Documentary
W hitechapel Gallery
London
The MIT Press
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p ’ *'" '.i-y
Documents of Contemporary Art
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Documentary / edited by Julian Stallabrass. 55 Hayward Street
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Modern—20th century. 3. Arts, Modern—21st Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street,
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NX180.D63D63 2013
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2012026831
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Series Editor: Iwona Blazwick; Commissioning Editor: Ian Farr; Project Editor: Sarah Auld; Editorial
Advisory Board: Achim Borchardt-Hume, Roger Conover, Neil Cummings, Mark Francis, David Jenkins,
Kirsty Ogg, Gilane Tawadros ^
The immediate instruments are two:
the motionless camera and the printed word.
The qoverninq instrument - which is also one of the centres of the subject -
INTRODUCTION// 0 12
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES//228
BIBLIOG1APHY//23Q
INDEX//234
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS//239
ORIGINS AND DEFINITIONS
Walter Benjam in Thirteen Theses Against Snobs,
1928//024
Elizabeth M cCausland Documentary Photography,
1939//025
Jam es Agee, with Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, 1941//029
John Grierson Postwar Patterns, 1946//030
CONVENTIONS
Philip Jones Griffiths The Curse of Colour, 2000//038
An-My Le Interview with Art21, 200 7 //0 42
David Goldblatt Interview with Mark Haworth-Booth,
2005//047
DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
Jo a n Fontcuberta Interview with Christina Zelich,
2 0 0 5 //180
Kutlug Atam an Interview with Ana Finel Honigman,
2 0 0 4 //183
Sean Snyder Marriot Hotel Islam abad, 2008//186
Omer Fast Interview with Sven Lutticken, 2007//190
Walid R aad Interview with Alan Gilbert, 2002//194
COMMITMENT
Craigie Horsfield Statement, 1987//200
Boris Mikhailov Statement, 1999//202
Renzo Martens Interview with Joe Penney, 2010//208
Regina Jose Galindo Interview with Francisco
Goldman, 2006//215
Barry Chudakov H asan Elahi: Surveillance
as Storytelling, 2011//221
Annemarie Ja cir Ram allah, 15 November 2006,
2006//223
Emily Ja cir Independence Day, 2 0 0 6 //2 2 5
Again and again similar images are repeated,
with only the actors and settings changing.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, 'Unconcerned But Not Indifferent', 2008
Julian Stallabrass
Introduction//Contentious Relations:
Art an d Documentary
If in the early 1990s you had predicted that documentary work would come to
make up a large and influential strand of contemporary art, the idea would
have seemed absurd. It would have been said that documentary had surely had
its day, perishing with the liberal politics that had nourished it; and along with
it, naive ideas about humanitarian reform and the ability of visual representation
to capture reality. Yet in the early twenty-first century the art world is
increasingly fractured between a commercial world of investment and
spectacular display, catering to the global elite, and the circulation of art on the
biennial scene, dominated by documentary work, particularly in photography
and video. This work is documentary in form and political in content, though
both exhibit a fair bit of variety. There are three linked reasons behind this
striking change: economic, technological and political. Economically, the
growth of the biennial scene is part of the general globalization of contemporary
art. As artists from nations outside of the US and Western Europe came to
prominence, they often brought with them distinct political positions and
perspectives that were quite alien from those of the old art world centres. They
were also often obliged to perform their nationality through reference to
politics (so Chinese artists regularly refer to censorship, Indian artists to
sectarian violence, and Russian artists to the communist past). Technologically,
it has become much easier and cheaper to make high-quality photography and
video, and the media landscape has been changed beyond recognition by mass
participation through social media. Politically, given the events of 11 September
2001 and the conflicts that followed, politics and its representation were
pushed violently to the fore.
From the moment when ‘documentary’ was formulated as a category in the
1930s, its relations with the art world were troubled and contentious. In film, it
was John Grierson who tried systematically to lay out the character of the new
mode, claiming that there need be no tension between documentary and art, and
that the ‘fact of the matter’ could be a path to modern beauty. Relations between
art and documentary were tied to the latter’s role in industry - via photography,
in the illustrated magazines, which were immensely powerful and popular from
the 1930s through to the 1960s; and film, through reflections on social relations,
often state-sponsored, which provided ways of having a nation see and think
about itself. As Grierson points out, documentary was also needed by the state as
a tool of social knowledge - and, by implication, control. As a servant of commerce
12//INTRODUCTION
and government, documentary was unsurprisingly looked on with scepticism
and mistrust by many in the art world.
If the relations between art and documentary have been highly variable
since the 1930s, this is because both realms changed hugely, sometimes in
response to one another. The expressive mutations of documentary photography
made by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand
were promoted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as an antidote to the
humanist photojournalism of Life and L ook} The decline of the illustrated
magazines in the face of competition from television brought forth the most
systematic art-world critique of their operations - from Martha Rosier and
Allan Sekula, among others. There were, of course, artists who continued to
engage intelligently with the documentary tradition - one need only think of
Gillian Wearing - but they remained a small minority.
The basis of the tension with art came about to the extent that documentary
was thought of as transparent reflection of the world, in which subjectivity,
creativity and expression were necessarily suppressed. This idea was linked to a
general association of documentary with ‘lower’ classes of producers - with
‘primitives’, workers, women and socialists. Elizabeth McCausland, who was
prominent in the US Photo League, committed to putting documentary to the
service of radical politics, makes this explicit: documentary will be made by
workers, not artists, and they will not try to prettify life but will present it
‘unretouched’, arriving at unadorned truth. It was a minority position, and we
shall see that many early documentarians made artistic claims for their work. Yet
if such a view now seems strange, it was partly because the Photo League was
effectively suppressed in the Cold War era by FBI harassment and media blackout,
along with an entire leftist culture.2
In the late 1920s, Walter Benjamin - a constructor of elaborate collages of
textual documents - wrote of the prejudices against the document, picking them
out with extreme clarity so as to delineate their absurdity. His list of ideological
prejudices has proved remarkably persistent, and is still heard among art world
‘snobs’ (in his terms) today. In the face of them, and from the beginning, artists’
documentary had to elaborate a meta-critique of the category of documentary,
which sometimes took on what now seems a remarkably postmodern hue. James
Agee, for instance, made a book in collaboration with Walker Evans, Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, about the living conditions of tenant farmers in the 1930s. In
Agee’s long and involuted text for the book, writer and photographer are often
highlighted as actors on (as well as mere recorders of) a scene, readers’ and
viewers’ expectations about how tenant farmers should be depicted are held up
for examination, and their motives for wanting to be exposed to such a subject
are sceptically judged. Evans’ photographs were equally self-conscious exemplars
14//INTRODUCTION
beyond mere documentary fact to suggest broader schema by making large-scale
museum photographs that dwell on a landscape formed by war, and a military
sublime. David Goldblatt, who first became known for very fine black-and-white
work about social issues in apartheid South Africa, argues that monochrome
suited that situation; but he has also made accomplished colour work for the
gallery, documenting a rapidly changing social and urban landscape in which the
colour of things is often important.
So conventions assure the viewer of documentary status, but this opens the
question of what exposure to those conventions does to the viewer. Views of this
were long dominated by Susan Sontag’s rhetorically brilliant writing in On
Photography: she argued that the photographic industry and its consumers
demanded novelty, so that for example even the most accomplished pictures of
famine (by Don McCullin) would dull the viewer by repetition, and corrupt the
conscience; and further, that documentary photography yields no knowledge,
merely sentimental feeling, and that it is part of an image culture that makes of
its habitual users ‘image junkies’. For decades, Sontag was ritually invoked on
such matters as an ineluctable authority. Some of her arguments were reinforced
and developed by Martha Rosier in her striking and influential critique of
documentary as a creature of liberal politics. It may show poverty and oppression
but cannot account for them other than as natural features of the social landscape,
to which the only response is charity. Even on occasions when documentary
does establish blame (and here Rosier refers to W. Eugene and Aileen Mioko
Smith’s celebrated work on the Minamata poisoning), its reception in bourgeois
society elevates the messenger above the message.4 In a clear and conscious case
of the owl of Minerva flying at dusk, Rosier encapsulates this system at the
moment of its eclipse, at the beginning of the neoliberal moment of Reagan,
Thatcher and Pinochet, and at the point when Rupert Murdoch was expelling
McCullin and serious photojournalism from the Sunday Times, demanding that
photographs of starving babies be replaced by those of successful businessmen
around their weekend barbecues.5 At the same time, Allan Sekula holds up
documentary photography to severe examination, particularly in an analysis of
the famous ‘Family of Man’ exhibition, staged by the Museum of Modern Art in
1955, which he sees as propagandizing for a universal language of sentiment
bent to Cold War purposes. Rosier and Sekula may be contrasted with Jean-Paul
Sartre’s writing about Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of China at the
moment of the revolution’s success: Sartre, writing from war-devastated Europe
in which the memory of starvation was still fresh, sketches out the power of
humanist photography at the moment at which he hopes that History will end
the ‘universal’ conditions of oppression on which it feeds.
The reawakening of documentary has been a product of the over-reach of
16//INTRODUCTION
that few of its major practitioners were quite as simple as they had been made
out. W. Eugene Smith, one of the most celebrated documentarians of the
illustrated magazines, writes against the idea of objective recording, and
celebrates a personal, interpretative expression of a subject, in which the stage
management of people and scenes is permitted. Similarly, Daido Moriyama
writes of a notorious incident in which Horst Faas and Michel Laurent photographed
the torture and murder of men thought to have collaborated with the Pakistani
Army at the time of the war in which Bangladesh was created: the controversy
centred on how much the presence of their cameras had caused the killings.
Moriyama, like Smith, thinks that the photographer’s role is to interpret, and not
merely to lose oneself in subject matter. Smith’s views were partly formed by
photographing the US war against Japan in terrible and perilous circumstances;
Moriyama’s by the long effective occupation of his country by the US following
the war, and the slow strangling of its ancient culture - hence his ambition to
grasp an outline of the totality of social relations, no matter how ugly.
An indication of the controversy that photojournalism still produces in the
art world may be seen in the opposing views offered by David Levi Strauss and
the photographic artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. In his essay on
Sebastiao Salgado, Levi Strauss challenges the widespread assumption that
beauty and documentary cannot mix, and that beauty cannot be put into the
service of social advancement. This is a defence of a singular figure who has
evolved his own distinctive and elegiac style, drawing much from W. Eugene
Smith in his celebration of workers, peasants and tribal peoples. In judging the
World Press Photo awards, Broomberg and Chanarin were exposed to the regular
fare of the industry, and they expose its cliches, its hunt for suffering, doubtful
ideologies and complicity with the war machine, which takes its creepiest form
in nostalgia for the Vietnam War. Alfredo Jaar, much of whose work has reflected
critically on the making and circulation of news photographs, is interviewed
about his remarkable installation piece on the life and death of Kevin Carter, who
made an infamous Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a starving Sudanese child
stalked by a vulture. Jaar admires photojournalists because through his own
practice, which includes work about the Rwandan genocide, he recognizes the
insurmountable contradictions which torture them as they depict famine, war
and other man-made disasters.
One of the most common critiques of visual documentary has been to do with
all that it excludes from view. Jaar made a work about this by displaying every Life
magazine cover that depicted Africa over sixty years (there are not many and they
mostly feature animals). There may be many reasons for such exclusions -
pragmatic, commercial, political and ideological. In analysing four of the very few
pictures to have emerged from inside Holocaust camps, Georges Didi-Huberman
18//INTRODUCTION
suspicion that the artist has engaged in some naive reflection of social reality;
the artist’s handiwork is evident, and with it artistic expression; there is also a
built-in commentary on the conventions and rhetoric of the documentary
tradition. The price may be paid, of course, in political effect: as with Rosler’s
account of the treatment of W. Eugene Smith, the focus may switch from subject
matter to maker, and if doubt is cast upon the veracity of one element, disbelief
may extend to all. Subjects become actors, either formally paid to perform a role,
or (as with Ataman) displaying the persona that ‘real’ people adopt.
Commitment to the subject takes many forms, and may lead documentarians
and artists into hardship and danger. In these circumstances, the exposure to risk
necessarily becomes a part of the work, as the limits of what may be recorded
become apparent, as does the vulnerability of the maker. The exposure to risk is
performed, and the action of the maker is clearly seen as an intervention in the
scene: in this way, and in tension with the opposition between story-telling and
political effect touched on before, it is linked to fiction.
Craigie Horsfield, who is best known for his black-and-white portraits and
scenes made in Poland in the 1970s, willingly submitted himself to live under
actually existing socialism, and writes here of a faithfulness to radical contingency,
to the alien character of a world that exceeds human concerns, recorded through
an intense engagement with the surface and a rejection of all pre-existing
categories. Boris Mikhailov, who was stuck with the same system, writes of how he
made work in the teeth of its many restrictions, including the ban on nakedness in
photography. The fall of communism led to the evaporation of the community that
had resisted and endured it, and in dramatically changed circumstances, Mikhailov
made work that demonstrated the new power relations forged by money.
In the extremely dangerous environment of urban Guatemala, Regina Jose
Galindo makes performances that produce documents of neglected issues,
especially about the subjection of women to exploitation and violence. She has
lived and had herself photographed as a maid, in a uniform that marks out her
lowly status, and makes her a subject to abuse. In a resonant condemnation of
her nation’s amnesia of its atrocious past, she walked from the Constitutional
Court to the National Palace of Guatemala, leaving a trail of bloody footsteps. The
performance and resulting video was a conductor for discussion about the
presidential candidacy of Efram Rios Montt, since arrested for genocide and
other crimes against humanity.
While Jackson and Jaar made work in central Africa to highlight issues that
barely registered in the Western mass media, Renzo Martens went to the Congo
to play an eccentric role as a provocateur, encouraging locals to document (and
thus profit) from their own poverty, cutting out Western professionals. In a
social scene in which charity is part of the problem and political change
1 See, for example, New Documents (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967), curated by John
Szarkowski.
2 See Anne Tucker, ‘The Photo League’, in Liz Heron and Val Williams, eds, Illuminations: Women
Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University
Press, 1996) 165-9.
3 Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc. (New York: Collier Books, 1971).
2 0 / /INTRODUCTION
4 W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith, Minamata (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography,
1981).
5 See Don McCullin with Lewis Chester, Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) 269-70.
6 Aside from the texts included in this collection, see Ariella Azoulay, Death’s Showcase - The Power
o f Image in Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001); Robert
Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and
Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance:
Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Jacques Ranciere,
The Emancipated Spectator (2008); trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009).
7 The ‘9/11 wars’ is the useful shorthand coined by Jason Burke: The 9/11 Wars (London: Allen
Lane, 2011); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain o f Others (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus &
Giroux/London: Hamish Hamilton 2003).
THAT WIL
NOT SOOI
■
AND THAT IN
THE
THE
IS TH OiMi ’\
■
PATH i Cl
—
—
(Snob in the private office of art criticism. On the left, a child’s drawing; on
right, a fetish. Snob: ‘Picasso might as well pack it in !’)
II. The artwork is only incidentally No document is, as such, a work of art.
a document.
XIII. The artist sets out to conquer The primitive man barricades himself
meanings. behind subject matter.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Thirteen Theses Against Snobs’ (1928); trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland,
in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 1. 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) 459.
Elizabeth M cCausland
Documentary Photography//1939
[...] The rise of documentary photography does not spring from fashion. Rather its
rapid growth represents strong organic forces at work, strong creative impulses
seeking an outlet suitable to the serious and tense spirit of our age. The proof that
documentary photography is not a fad or a vogue lies in the history of other
movements in photography. Before the documentary, the technical capricci of
Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray; before the ‘photogram’ and the ‘rayograph’, the Photo-
Secession; before that, the pictorialists. What came of these? From the abstract
and surrealist tendencies, Cecil Beaton. From the Photo-Secession a few fine
workers like Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Charles Sheeler, the best of their
mature energies being best employed when they turn to newer and more objective
purposes. From the pictorial school, the Oval Table [society of photographers].
Against this pattern of sterility, of ideas which could not reproduce
themselves, we have the new function (and evolving from it the new aesthetic)
of documentary photography, an application of photography that is direct and
realistic, dedicated to the profound and sober chronicling of the external world.
To Lewis Hine, who thirty-five years ago was making photographs of child labour
in sweat shops and textile mills, the vague tenets of pictorialism, or the even
less useful purposes of the ‘photogram’ or ‘rayograph’, m ustbe incomprehensible.
To the hard-working photographers of the Farm Security Administration, the
somewhat remote and abstruse manner of the spiritual heirs of the Photo-
Secession may seem too refined. To such a photographer as Berenice Abbott,
setting down the tangible visage of New York in precise detail and lineament,
the sentimental fantasies of a Fassbender1 must be well nigh incredible.
M cC a u sla n d //D o cu m e n ta ry P h o to g ra p h y // 2 7
The new spirit in art (if, after all the talk, we agree that photography is an art)
represents a drastic reversal position from the attitudes of the twenties. One
cannot imagine a Joyce or a Proust producing documentary photographs, if
photography were their medium. On the contrary, one can think of a Thomas
Mann finding documentary photography much to his liking, congenial as it is to
the careful factual implementation of The Magic Mountain.
Instead, for prototypes we turn back to the ages of realism, to Balzac, to Fielding,
to Dickens, to a painter like Gericault who painted humble scenes of farm life as
well as grandiose mythological scenes. A work of art, on this basis, must have
meaning, it must have content, it must communicate, it must speak to an audience.
The cult of non-intelligibility and non-communication is no longer fashionable;
only a fringe of survivors makes a virtue of a phrase which is a dead issue.
For communication, the photograph has qualities equalled by no other
pictorial medium. If one wishes to present the interior of a slum dwelling where
eight people live in one room, the camera will reveal the riddled floors, the dirty
bedding, the dishes stacked unwashed on a table, the thousand and one details
that total up to squalour and human degradation. To paint each item completely
would take a dozen Hoochs and Chardins many months. Here with the
instantaneous blink of the camera eye, we have reality captured, set down for as
long as negative and print will endure.
Actually there is no limit to the world of external reality the photographer
may record. Every subject is significant, considered in its context and viewed in
the light of historical forces. It is the spirit of his approach which determines the
value of the photographer’s endeavour; that plus his technical ability to say what
he wants to say. First of all, there is no room for exhibitionism or opportunism or
exploitation in the equipment of the documentary photographer. His purpose
must be clear and unified, and his mood simple and modest. Montage of his
personality over his subject will only defeat the serious aims of documentary
photography. For the greatest objective of such work is to widen the world we live
in, to acquaint us with the range and variety of human existence, to inform us (as
it were forcibly) of unnecessary social horrors such as war, to make us aware of
the civilization in which we live and hope to function as creative workers. This is
a useful work, and as such beyond claims of mere personality or clique.
1 [Adolf Fassbender, photographer and teacher (1884-1980), who published his highly aestheticized
photogravures in Pictorial Artistry: The Dramatization o f the Beautiful (1937)]
Elizabeth McCausland, extract from ‘Documentary Photography’, Photo Notes (January 1939);
reprinted in Liz Heron and Val Williams, eds, Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the
1850s to the Present (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996) 170-73.
[...] The nominal subject is North American cotton tenantry as examined in the
daily living of three representative white tenant families.
Actually, the effort is to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined
existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication,
analysis and defence. More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain
normal predicaments of human divinity.
The immediate instruments are two: the motionless camera and the printed
word. The governing instrument - which is also one of the centres of the subject
- is individual, anti-authoritative human consciousness.
Ultimately, it is intended that this record and analysis be exhaustive, with no
detail, however trivial it may seem, left untouched, no relevancy avoided, which
lies within the power of remembrance to maintain, of the intelligence to perceive,
and of the spirit to persist in.
Of this ultimate intention the present volume is merely portent and fragment,
experiment, dissonant prologue. Since it is intended, among other things, as a
swindle, an insult and a corrective, the reader will be wise to bear the nominal
subject, and his expectation of its proper treatment, steadily in mind. For that is
the subject with which the authors are dealing throughout. If complications
arise, that is because they are trying to deal with it not as journalists, sociologists,
politicians, entertainers, humanitarians, priests or artists, but seriously.
The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are co-equal, mutually
independent and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the impotence of
the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does
not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of
photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.
The text was written with reading aloud in mind. That cannot be recommended;
but it is suggested that the reader attend with his ear to what he takes off the page:
for variations of tone, pace, shape and dynamics are here particularly unavailable
to the eye alone, and with their loss, a good deal of meaning escapes.
It was intended also that the text be read continuously, as music is listened to
or a film watched, with brief pauses only where they are self-evident.
Of any attempt on the part of the publishers, or others, to disguise or in any
other way to ingratiate this volume, the authors must express their regret, their
intense disapproval and, as observers awaiting new contributions to their subject,
their complaisance.
James Agee, with the photographer Walker Evans, extract from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1941); reprinted edition (London: Violette Editions, 2001) 2 4 -6 ; 27.
John Grierson
Postwar P attern s//1946
[...] The documentary is the branch of film production which goes to the actual,
and photographs it and edits it and shapes it. It attempts to give form and pattern
to the complex of direct observation. Intimacy with the fact of the matter is
therefore the distinguishing mark of the documentary, and it is not greatly
important how this is achieved. Although Grapes o f Wrath was a studio picture,
some of us would not object to its being called a documentary picture, because in
the re-enactment little of Steinbeck’s original and direct observation was lost. The
studios did not, as they so often do, erect a barrier between the spectator and the
actual. This time, their filter was permissive rather than preventive of reality.
In contrast, one might say that many films shot on location and face to face
with the actual are much less documentary in the true sense than Grapes o f Wrath.
For we can come directly at life and miss its significance and its reality by a mile.
On a building at the Paris Exposition there was an inscription that said, in effect, ‘If
you come with empty hands we can give you nothing, but if you come with gifts
we will enrich you greatly.’ It is like that with documentary films. The presence of
the actual does not make a documentary film, because what one does with the
actual can be as meretricious and synthetic and phoney as Hollywood at its worst.
One has only to bring a silly eye to the actual and pick the wrong things to shoot.
One has only to ask the wrong questions to photograph the wrong answers.
‘Vision without understanding is empty’, said Kant, and understanding
without vision is blind. One may well take this as a special guide for one’s
approach to the documentary film. No branch of art has ever more deliberately
tried to combine research with interpretation, or laid so much emphasis on the
John Grierson, extracts from ‘Postwar Patterns’, Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1946)
159-65.
I arrived at the refugee camp before dawn. The sounds of hunger came from the
makeshift huts, the moaning, the coughing and the cries of starving babies. My
cameras were loaded with colour film dictated by the editor of the magazine
who’d assigned me. Perhaps this time the soft dawn light would bathe the victims
in the monochrome brown of dusty Africa, so that the emotions of suffering,
helplessness and the humanity and the grace of an anguished people could be
captured on colour film.
Alas, as dawn broke, I was confronted with a kaleidoscope of bright happy
colours. Not only were the thorn-bush walls covered with glistening blue plastic
sheeting but the ground was littered with gaudy feeding bowls of many colours,
all primary.
A few frames to record the traditional Western arrogance that assumes that
starving people are somehow cheered up by bright colours might be in order, but
the significant reality of the situation was impossible to capture.
I believe that photography owes its status to achieving what no other medium
can, capturing the reality of the defining moments of human existence as
decisively as possible. It’s not easy, for the perceptive eye has to make split-
second decisions about what to record and, naturally, compose everything within
a geometric whole that adds to the comprehension of the intention. It’s difficult
but not impossible to achieve this visual orgasm - that confirmation from some
inscrutable part of the brain that verifies success. Possible in black and white,
rarely achievable in colour.
The evidence shows that, working in those media where control can be
exercised, colour can be a vital tool in the repertoire of visual devices. But control
is antithetical to real photography - we are there with our cameras to record
reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography
of its most valuable attribute. We would be enervating the very core of our
medium. For us, colour is the ultimate distraction.
Why colour anyway? In the example of the refugee camp the answer is a trite
one: the magazine’s advertisements are in colour, therefore it’s considered
prudent for the editorial content to follow suit. Yet no one can deny the ability of
colour to produce a psychological effect on the viewer. Those reproducing reality,
rather than capturing it, have a free hand. Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid took place in a Wild West turned into a blistering hell by the use of a red-
38//CONVENTIONS
enhancing Didymium filter. In 1966 Antonioni took to painting the very streets of
London a different colour to convey the sensation he was after in his film Blow
up. And painters, unhindered by the strictures of reality, have used colour in a
most meaningful way, skewing the palette to enchant us, although not always
with profound understanding, as Picasso once revealed: ‘Why do two colours,
put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No!’
Obviously, logically, within the visual arts it cannot be denied that colour is an
important element that can effectively be used to convey or illustrate passions and
feelings. But let’s assume that the Polaroid Corporation invented tomorrow a
camera that somehow captured smell (and no one could doubt that smell is a
perfectly valid and useful addition to the many means of communication) so that
by looking closely at the print the viewer could inhale the aroma of the subject
photographed. Here would be an exciting new dimension to our medium. However,
if the only smell that came from the print was the body odour of the photographer,
I’d venture to say the exciting new medium would soon be dropped.
Once the camera is loaded with colour film, the problems begin. A significant
moment between two people is ruined because one overpowers the other by
wearing a crimson shirt. A voluptuous scene of a breast-feeding mother and
baby is rendered a dirty green by fluorescent light. In ‘mixed lighting’ situations
people’s faces are either burning red or glacial blue. All these deficiencies can
be overcome to some extent. But at a cost that involves the minimizing of that
which gives photography its standing as the greatest visual medium the world
has ever known.
Colour as an obstacle to great photography can be illustrated as follows: Let’s
assume that all the cassettes of monochrome film Cartier-Bresson ever exposed
had somehow been surreptitiously loaded with colour film. I’d venture to say
that about two thirds of his pictures would be ruined and the remainder
unaffected, neither spoiled nor improved. And perhaps one in a thousand
enhanced. Low odds, indeed.
Obviously most of us know when our cameras are loaded with colour film,
and, if intelligent and not suffering from colour blindness, we will recognize the
challenge and attempt to rise to it. Wide-angle lenses are used to minimize the
size of, and telephoto ones to avoid, unwanted colourful objects within the frame.
Coloured flash (an anathema to reality) is used to correct unwanted colour. But
beyond these attempts a more subtle shift takes place - we become consumed
with colour composition and neglect the message. For it’s hard to concentrate on
capturing an exquisite moment of tenderness between lovers in a cafe whilst
trying to minimize distracting bottles of ketchup!
When colour photography became popular with the invention of the four-
colour printing process that allowed magazines like National Geographic to print
4 0 / / CONVENTIONS
is only partly successful - caring editors still want the original. Certainly
photographic agencies such as Magnum would not exist if fifty years ago printers
demanded the original black and white negatives to reproduce from. After a few
trips to the printer they would be scratched and ink-splattered to oblivion.
Using colour negative film is an option, but the processed film has a limited
life (especially when processed in one-hour photo booths). In twenty years there
will be no record of the Gulf War as the negatives will have faded away. The
conflict was exclusively photographed on negative film because it could be
processed locally for censorship by the military. It is to be hoped that someone
will have made digital files for posterity. And as for prints made from colour
negatives, they are even less permanent. The joke was that Kodak designed their
prints to last as long as the average American marriage, 7.2 years! When your
mate’s face in the wedding photo on the mantelpiece started to turn green, it was
time to find a new one.
As I sit writing this in my hotel room in Phnom Penh, the vagaries of the
Cambodian electrical system cause the TV to keep jumping between colour and
black and white every few minutes. I recall an old observation - the same scene,
glitzy in colour, attains a profundity when the set switches to black and white. A
resonance occurs that triggers a strange emotional identification within the
labyrinths of the mind. An empathy that has its roots deep in the brain’s visual
cortex - a mechanism that awards an importance to memory in monochrome.
The same mechanism, I believe, that causes us to dream in black and white.
Philip Jones Griffiths, ‘The Curse of Colour’, first published as ‘Der Fluch der Farbe’, Du magazine
(July 2000).
An-My Le When you photograph the real world, you cannot escape the reality of
it. But I think the magic of photography happens when you can escape the facts
- the factual aspect of what’s being represented. One is always striving to suggest
something beyond what is described. It’s something I’m very aware of. Someone
who doesn’t know straight photography would have issues with this, and maybe
would see my work as plain documentary. It does describe certain facts. But I
think the strength of it comes from what I can suggest that was not in the
photograph at first - what was not in what I saw, and not in the situation itself.
An-My Le I feel so much more confident about the kind of photography I do now.
It has answered a lot of the questions and the anxiety I had as a graduate student
- feeling that I wasn’t doing enough as an artist. All I did was push the button and
set my frame. I really wanted to have a hand at transforming things and making
things. It was very frustrating. So I started making this stylized work where I
sampled, lit and rephotographed things that were very contrived and arty. But I
think it was necessary for me to do that and then go back to making ‘straight’
pictures and to realize how powerful they could be. [...]
Art21 Part of your childhood was spent in Vietnam during the war.
An-My Le We lived in Vietnam through many of the offensives and coups. In 1968
after the Tet offensive the Viet Cong took over part of the city for a while. My
mother was distraught, and she thought she should try to get us out and live
somewhere a bit more peaceful. She received a fellowship to go to France. She took
us - the three children - to Paris, and our father stayed in Vietnam as a guarantor.
We came back after the Paris Agreement in 1973 and stayed in Vietnam for another
year and a half before the war ended. War was part of life for us. People ask, ‘Wasn’t
it frightening?’ We were really too young to know it the way an adult would. As a
child, it’s just part of your life and you deal with it when it happens.
42//CONVENTIONS
An-My Le I think we’re all dealt a card in life, and I used to think that I was dealt a
very difficult one. Then I came to realize that it has made my life richer and that it
has been a great foil for my work. Without really being conscious of it when doing
my work, I’ve always tried to understand the meaning of war, how it has affected
my life, and what it means to live through times of turbulence like that. A lot of
those questions fuel my work. You approach different issues at different times of
your life. When I first made the pictures in Vietnam, I was not ready to deal with
the war. Being able to go back to Vietnam was a way to reconnect with a homeland,
or with the idea of what a homeland is and with the idea of going home. As soon
as I got to Vietnam, I realized that I was not so interested in the specific psychology
of each person. I was much more interested in their activities, and how those
activities splayed onto the landscape. It seemed to me that this suggested a lot
more about the culture and history of the country. And this was more fitting for me
in terms of the way I worked and what I was interested in. There are some people
(like Judith Ross) who can photograph one person and somehow suggest a
collective history, a collective memory. But it seems that I try to do that with
landscape. When you live in exile, things like smells and memories and stories
from childhood all take on such importance. So this was an opportunity to
reconnect with the real thing, and to be confronted with contemporary Vietnam.
It’s not the way it was twenty years ago, or the way it’s described in folktales my
grandmother and mother used to tell me, or even in stories from my mother’s own
childhood in the North. So I really looked for things that suggested a certain way of
life - agrarian life - things that connect you to the land. Unfortunately, pictures
don’t smell, but if I could do that they would be about smells as well.
Art2i Do you see your work as part of any particular photographic tradition?
Art21 How did you first decide upon the Vietnam War as a subject matter for
your work (Viet Nam, 1994-98, and Small Wars, 1999-200 2 )?
An-My Le When I became a photographer one of the first things I learned from
speaking to other artists who had more experience was that unless you’re a
conceptual artist it’s best to draw from what you know the most. And what did I
know the most? It was how much of a mess my life was, and trying to make
sense of it and the questions of war and destruction - how things are still
unresolved with the Vietnam War in America. That’s something I wanted to
touch, as well as the representation of war in movies and, now, the war in Iraq. I
was distraught when the war started in March 2003, and I felt my heart going out
to the soldiers being sent to Iraq. I wanted to explore that (in 29 Palms, 2 0 0 3 -4 )
and to know more about how we were preparing for the war.
Art21 There must be a fine line between making a representation of war and
aestheticizing it.
An-My Le The kind of work that I make is not the standard political work. It’s not
agitprop. You would think, because I’ve seen so much devastation and lived
through a war, that I should make something that’s outwardly anti-war. But I am
not categorically against war. I was more interested in drawing people into my
work to think about the issues that envelop war - representations of war,
landscape and terrain in war. When I’m working with the military, I still think of
myself as a landscape photographer. My main goal is to try to photograph
landscape in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a
history of culture. But I also wanted to address issues of preparation (moral and
military). It drew me in, but at the same time it was repellent I’m fascinated by
the military structure, by strategy, the idea of a battle, the gear. But at the same
time, how do you resolve the impact of it? What it is meant to do is ju st horrible.
But war can be beautiful. I think it’s the idea of the sublime - moments that are
horrific but at the same time beautiful - moments of communion with the
landscape and nature. And it’s that beauty that I wanted to embrace in my work.
I think that’s why the work seems ambiguous. And it’s meant to be. War is an
inextricable part of the history of high civilization; I think it’s here to stay. But I
also think we need to try to avoid it as much as possible. I was not so interested
in making work that you see on the news page, which has the effect of wanting
44//CONVENTIONS
you to condemn war immediately. I wanted to approach the idea in a more
complicated and challenging way.
Art21 There’s a quiet subtlety to your photographs of the Vietnam War re
enactors in Small Wars (1 999-2000). Why is that?
An-My Le The pictures of the re-enactors shy away from some of the more
subversive scenes that they performed - whether taking prisoners or their
rough handling of the other camp. I didn’t find it fruitful to dwell on that or try
to replicate some of the horrific moments that happened during the war. I
stayed away from that, and obviously that comes from my personal background.
But with the help of the re-enactors, this was a way to direct my own movie
without having the means and potential to be my own director. I don’t have
such a great imagination, so seeing certain things that they did inspired me. I
was able to make a Vietnam War that was ultimately safe, a game. In that way,
I was able to bring in my own experience.
Art21 Why have you chosen black and white versus colour photography for
certain projects?
Art21 What is the impact upon the work of using a large format camera?
An-My Le It’s the same camera I’ve been using since 1991, and it’s a very
cumbersome camera. Because it’s so cumbersome, it makes me make a particular
type of picture. It forces me to resolve certain questions. If you want to photograph
something and the camera is not suitable for it, how do you figure it out? How do
you solve the problem? These questions came up photographing military exercises.
Of course Timothy O’Sullivan did it in the nineteenth century during the Civil War
and other photographers like Roger Fenton did it, but it just seems unsuitable. So
how do you resolve those issues? I’m interested in what I have to go through to
make it work. It forces me to make a particular type of picture and I like what it
makes me do. Working against the grain forces me to come up with new ways of
resolving something [...] It just forces you to work in a different way.
Art21 Do you think there’s a built-in relationship between photography and the
sublime?
An-My Le, extracts from interview with Art21 online magazine (April 2007); a longer, re-edited
version was reprinted in Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, vol. 4, ed. Marybeth Sollins (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 2007). Interviews by Susan Sollins.
46//CONVENTIONS
David Goldblatt
Interview with Mark Haworth-Booth//2005
Mark Haworth-Booth You were the first photographer who shocked me by saying
- in the early 1990s, I think - that you had used a computer to manipulate a
photograph. As I recall, you were photographing a building on assignment and
found that a car was parked inconveniently in front of it. Your new colour pictures
seem intrinsically connected with digital technology. What is the story of your
involvement with digital photography?
Aside from the photographer Sam Haskins, who was extremely generous in
showing me how photographs can be made to work with each other on the page,
and whose strongly graphic sensibility influenced me for a time, my principal
South African influences have been literary rather than photographic. The early
stories of Nadine Gordimer made vivid for me what I knew of the smell and taste
and touch, and the social weight of things here, but which I had never seen or
heard expressed. They led me to want to put these understandings into
photographs. The succinct, earthy, penetrating yet compassionate irony of
Herman Charles Bosman’s stories of Afrikaner life helped shape my photography.
Bosman’s pupil and editor, the writer Lionel Abrahams, gave me much
encouragement and the benefit of his wit and profound wisdom. I was excited by
correlations between the substance of Athol Fugard’s early plays and my
photography. And the writer and theatrical director Barney Simon provoked me
4 8 / / CONVENTIONS
into developing a photographic ‘independence’ by his critical appreciation of my
work. An extraordinary if eccentric influence was that of the poet Charles
Eglington, then editor of the Anglo American Corporation’s house magazine,
Optima. We had an arrangement under which I undertook to provide photographic
essays which were to be my ‘personal work’ rather than designed for magazine
consumption. If he liked them he was free to publish; if he didn’t he would pay
me anyway. Under this benign rule he published my work on Soweto, Transkei
and shaftsinking. After his death a new editor disliked my essay on the white
community of Boksburg, but honoured the arrangement. [...]
Haworth-Booth Is there a sense in which the colour materials you have used in
this body of work have allowed you to gather different kinds of evidence and
represent other forms of the generally overlooked or unseen?
Goldblatt Much of the subject matter of the recent - i.e. the colour - work, is the
kind that would engage me whatever the medium in which I was photographing.
Obviously colour photography makes it possible to encompass some subjects
that I would not otherwise be able satisfactorily to render - e.g. blue asbestos or
a pot of brightly painted plastic flowers. But in general I don’t think there has
been a fundamental shift in my interests. However, in becoming aware of the
colour of things as a quality to be explored, I have had to take colour into account
in a way that I didn’t before and I have become intrigued by trying to bring the
rendition of colour in the print into congruence with my sense of colour or the
lack of it in ‘reality’. This has much to do with the material and the process I am
using. They seem peculiarly suited to what I want to do. They enable me to tackle
subjects and to render them in ways that would previously have been well nigh
impossible in colour.
David Goldblatt and Mark Haworth-Booth, extracts from interview, South African Intersections
(Munich: Prestel, 2005) 94-8.
D E S P I T E THE V E R Y
VISIBLE EXISTENCE
OF A D O C U M E N T A R Y
The question of how best to define the documentary film and video and to
distinguish it from the fiction film continues to fascinate and baffle philosophers
and film theorists. It is clear that the special nature of the film medium - and in
particular its use of photographic images and sound recordings - has proven
particularly difficult to conceptualize in relation to the fiction/non-fiction film
distinction. Here I offer a characterization of the documentary that can account
for the visual and aural nature of the medium and that furthers our understanding
of what we mean when we use the word ‘documentary’. I call my theory a
characterization rather than a definition, because rather than posit necessary
and sufficient conditions, I will be content to identify and describe the central
tendencies of the typical, or usual, documentary film.
Terminological confusion often results from various uses of the word
‘documentary’ and the phrase ‘non-fiction film’. In its most expansive sense, a
non-fiction film is any film not fictional, for example, instructional films,
advertisements, corporate films, or historical or biographical documentaries. The
Scottish filmmaker and theorist John Grierson called the documentary the
‘creative treatment of actuality’, a characterization that simultaneously
distinguishes the documentary from the fiction film (not thought to be primarily
a treatment of actuality) and the non-fiction film (not thought to be creative or
dramatic).1 Although the distinction between non-fiction film and documentary
cannot bear much theoretical weight, it might be useful to think of the documentary
as a subset of non-fiction films, characterized by more aesthetic, social, rhetorical
and/or political ambition than, say, a corporate or instructional film. [... ]
It would be useful to begin by identifying and briefly examining the two best
candidates for traditional definitions of the documentary. These are what I call
the Documentary as Indexical Record (DIR) and the Documentary as Assertion
(DA) accounts. In the next two sections of this essay I give descriptions of the
basic claims of these accounts, noting internal problems and proposing a
plausible statement of each. In the third section, I show how both accounts fail as
traditional definitions of the documentary. In Sections IV and V, I develop an
alternative account, in which I argue that the typical or usual documentary is
what I call an ‘asserted veridical representation’.
V. What a Documentary Is
Now I am prepared to say what a documentary is, after all.
I propose that the typical or usual documentary film be conceived of as an
asserted veridical representation, that is, as an extended treatment of a subject
in one of the moving-image media, most often in narrative, rhetorical, categorical
or associative form, in which the film’s makers openly signal their intention that
the audience (1) take an attitude of belief toward relevant propositional content
(the ‘saying’ part); (2) take the images, sounds, and combinations thereof as
reliable sources for the formation of beliefs about the film’s subject and, in some
cases; (3) take relevant shots, recorded sounds and/or scenes as phenomenological
approximations of the look, sound, and/or some other sense or feel of the pro-
filmic event (the ‘showing’ part). [...]
The interesting task now would be to explore the conventions of asserted
veridical representation in various documentary modes or exemplars, in the
docudrama or what some call ‘non-fiction movies’,12 and in various documentary
techniques and practices. Veridical representation is widely assumed, but poorly
understood, and much work remains to be done. Yet the notion of asserted
1 Grierson quoted in the editor Forsyth Hardy’s introduction to Grierson on Documentary (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966) 13.
2 [footnote 4 in source] C.S. Peirce, ‘The Icon, Index and Symbol', in Collected Papers, 8 vols., ed. C.
Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1931-58) vol.
II.
3 [5] See my Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997) 59.
4 [7] For a critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist theories of the documentary, see Noel
Carroll, ‘Non-fiction Film and Postmodernist Scepticism’ in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
28 3 -3 0 6 ; see also my essay, ‘Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Non-fiction Film: Two
Approaches’ in the same volume, 307-24.
5 [8] Gregory Currie, ‘Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs’, The Journal
o f Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 57 (1999) 285-97.
6 [9] Here Currie refers to Kendall Walton’s ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic
Realism’, Critical Inquiry, no. 11 (1984) 246-77.
7 [16] Carroll, ‘Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis’
in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997)173-202.
8 [17] Ibid., 186.
9 [2] Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001) 9 9 -
138.
10 [26] Currie, ‘Visible Traces’, op. cit., 296.
11 [29] For a discussion of the philosophical implications of cinema verite, see Carroll’s ‘From Real
to Reel’, Philosophic Exchange, no. 14 (1983) 5-46.
12 [36] This is the term used by filmmaker Carl Byker for his historical films, for example, Woodrow
Wilson and The Saga o f the Israelites, which make heavy use of historical re-enactments.
Carl Plantinga, extracts from ‘What a Documentary Is, After AH’, The Journal o f Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, vol. 63, no. 2 (Spring 2005) 105-17 [footnotes abbreviated].
The images exhibited by our museums and galleries today can in fact be classified
into three major categories. First of all, there is what might be called the naked
image: the image that does not constitute art, because what it shows us excludes
the prestige of dissemblance and the rhetoric of exegeses. Thus a recent exhibition
entitled ‘Memoires des camps’ devoted one of its sections to photographs taken
during the discovery of the Nazi camps. The photographs were often signed by
famous names - Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, and so on - but the idea that
brought them together was the trace of history, of testimony to a reality that is
generally accepted not to tolerate any other form of presentation.
Different from the naked image is what I shall call the ostensive image. This
image likewise asserts its power as that of sheer presence, without signification.
But it claims it in the name of art. It posits this presence as the peculiarity of art
faced with the media circulation of imagery, but also with the powers of
meaning that alter this presence: the discourses that present and comment on
it, the institutions that display it, the forms of knowledge that historicize it.
This position can be encapsulated in the title of an exhibition recently organized
at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts by Thierry de Duve to exhibit ‘one hundred
years of contemporary art’: ‘Void’. The affect of the that w as is here apparently
referred to the identity without residue of a presence of which ‘contemporaneity’
is the very essence. The obtuse presence that interrupts histories and discourses
becomes the luminous power of a face-to-face: facingness, as the organizer
puts it, obviously contrasting this notion with Clement Greenberg’s flatness.
But the very contrast conveys the meaning of the operation. Presence opens
out into presentation of presence. Facing the spectator, the obtuse power of the
image as being-there-w ithout-reason becomes the radiance of a face, conceived
on the model of the icon, as the gaze of divine transcendence. The works of the
artists - painters, sculptors, video-makers, installers - are isolated in their
sheer haecceity. But this haeccity immediately splits in two. The works are so
many icons attesting to a singular mode of material presence, removed from
the other ways in which ideas and intentions organize the data of sense
experience. ‘Me void ’, ‘Nous void’, ‘Vous void’ - the three rubrics of the
exhibition - make them witness to an original co-presence of people and
things, of things between themselves, and of people between themselves. And
Duchamp’s tireless urinal once again does service, via the pedestal on which
Stieglitz photographed it. It becomes a display of presence making it possible
o.--!IVE'ISILv D DE A,': i lU U U iA
R a n c ie re //N a k e d Im a g e , O stensive Im a g e , M etam o rp E Ic I m a g e //6 3
to identify the dissemblances of art with the interactions of hyper
resemblance.
Contrasting with the ostensive image is what I shall call the metamorphic
image. Its power as art can be summarized in the exact opposite of ‘Void’: the
‘Voila’ that recently gave its title to an exhibition at the Musee d’art moderne de la
Ville de Paris, sub-titled ‘Le monde dans la tete’. This title and subtitle involve an
idea of the relations between art and image that much more broadly inspires a
number of contemporary exhibitions. According to this logic, it is impossible to
delimit a specific sphere of presence isolating artistic operations and products
from forms of circulation of social and commercial imagery and from operations
interpreting this imagery. The images of art possess no peculiar nature of their
own that separates them in stable fashion from the negotiation of resemblances
and the discursiveness of symptoms. The labour of art thus involves playing on the
ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, bringing about a
local reorganization, a singular rearrangement of circulating images. In a sense the
construction of such devices assigns art the tasks that once fell to the ‘critique of
images’. Only this critique, left to the artists themselves, is no longer framed by an
autonomous history of forms or a history of deeds changing the world. Thus art is
led to query the radicalism of its powers, to devote its operations to more modest
tasks. It aims to play with the forms and products of imagery, rather than carry out
their demystification. This oscillation between two attitudes was evident in a
recent exhibition, presented in Minneapolis under the title ‘Let’s Entertain’ and in
Paris as ‘Au-dela du spectacle’. The American title invited visitors both to play the
game of an art freed from critical seriousness and to mark a critical distance from
the leisure industry. For its part, the French title played on the theorization of the
game as the active opposite of the passive spectacle in the texts of Guy Debord.
Spectators thus found themselves called upon to accord Charles Ray’s merry-go-
round or Maurizio Cattelan’s giant table football set their metaphorical value and
to take playful semi-distance from the media images, disco sounds or commercial
mangas [cartoon imagery] reprocessed by other artists.
The device of the installation can also be transformed into a theatre of memory
and make the artist a collector, archivist or window-dresser, placing before the
visitor’s eyes not so much a critical clash of heterogeneous elements as a set of
testimonies about a shared history and world. Thus the exhibition ‘Voila’ aimed to
recap a century and illustrate the very notion of a century, by bringing together,
inter alia, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s photographs of one hundred people aged 0-100,
Christian Boltanski’s installation of telephone subscribers, Alighiero Boetti’s 720
Letters from Afghanistan, or the Martins room devoted by Bertrand Lavier to
exhibiting 50 canvases linked only by the family name of their authors.
The unifying principle behind these strategies clearly seems to be to bring
Jacques Ranciere, ‘Naked Image, Ostensive Image, Metaphoric Image’, from Le Destin des Images (Paris:
La Fabrique, 2003); trans. Gregory Elliott, The Future o f the Image (London and New York: Verso, 2007)
22-31 [footnotes not included].
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Documentary Is/Not a N a m e //1990
Trinh T. Minh-ha, extracts from ‘ Documentary Is/Not a Name’, October, vol. 52 (Spring 1990) 76;
7 8 -8 9 ; 90; 95-7.
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W. Eugene Smith, extract from ‘Photographic Journalism’, Photo Notes (June 1948) 4-5.
For some years now, I’ve been thinking about the potential of photography.
W hat is it capable of? Of course, this question is inextricably linked to a more
fundamental question: what is human existence itself? To seek an easy answer
to either of these questions is to enter a boundless, unknowable labyrinth.
Furthermore, knowing the horror of the connection between our forcibly
resigned, befuddled selves and the oppressive cruelty of world events, unfolding
inexorably before our eyes into an indeterminate future, we become lost in the
powerlessness of the self. Having said this, to propose that photography is
capable of nothing (as if to say one must die if one cannot fin d a reason fo r living)
compounds the cruelty, ju st as the Subject suffers the ravages of time.
Until a few years ago, I was able to stave off an awareness that there is not
an ounce of beauty in the world, and that humanity is a thing of extreme
hideousness. So I could shoot and believe in something. But there came a point
where rationalization and belief became impossible - a sensibility that
continued until quite recently.
This lasted for more than ten years, during which time - with camera in hand
- 1 passed intuitively and corporeally through an intricate weave of dramas, with
countless individuals in various spheres, to find myself possessed, at one point,
by thought, as though my very body had been wrapped in that woven tapestry.
In other words, I came to focus solely on the darkest, coldest regions at the heart
of human existence. I was tortured by an incomprehensible feeling of unease, an
indescribable sense of powerlessness. Until recently, I have been plagued by the
feeling that I was missing something entirely. It’s only now that I’ve finally come
to feel myself being steadily released from such plagues.
For almost two years, outside of a few very rare assignments, I almost never
carried a camera - but lately I’ve begun to put my heart back into the effort. I now
take my camera with me every day, and have started again to make photographs
incessantly.Just as I used to do, I now photograph everything, as if possessed. But,
disliking photographs as static, strictly decorative visual art pieces, and being
distrustful of the fanatical emphasis on realism in photojournalism, I am now
striving to go beyond established styles and widen the boundaries of photographic
expression. Unlike in the past, however, when my zeal was informed by rote
repetition, an almost overbearingly methodical approach, my photographs now
contain a certain decisiveness. Of course, the word ‘decisive’ may sound
overbearing in itself, but it’s actually an extremely simple concept. It ju st means
1 The journalists were Horst Faas and Michel Laurent. [See the introduction to this volume, 18.]
Daido Moriyama, extract from ‘The Decision to Shoot’, Yomiuri Shimbun (Tokyo, 1 August 1972);
reprinted in Ivan Vartanian, et al., eds, Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers (New York:
Aperture, 2006) 34-6.
Jean -P au l Sartre
From One China to A nother//1954
The picturesque has its origins in war and a refusal to understand the enemy: our
enlightenment about Asia actually came to us first from irritated missionaries and
from soldiers. Later came travellers - traders and tourists - who are soldiers that
have cooled off. Pillaging is called shopping, and rape is practised onerously in
specialized shops. But the basic attitude has not changed: the natives are killed
less frequently but they are scorned collectively, which is the civilized form of
massacre; the aristocratic pleasure of counting the differences is savoured. ‘I cut
my hair, he plaits his; I use a fork, he uses chopsticks; I write with a goose quill, he
draws characters with a paintbrush; I have ideas which are straight, and his are
bent: have you noticed that he is horrified by movement in a straight line, that he
is only happy if everything goes sideways?’ This is called the game of anomalies:
if you find another one, if you discover another reason for not understanding, you
will be given a prize for sensitivity in your own country. You must not be surprised
Jean-Paul Sartre, extracts from preface, D'une Chine a I’autre [photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson]
(Paris: Robert Delpire, 1954); trans.Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, Terry McWilliams, in Colonialism
and Neocolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 17-29.
Allan Sekula
The Traffic in Photographs//1981
You have in front of you a kind of cultural history, better, sociology of the last 30
years. How to write sociology without writing, but presenting photographs
instead, photographs of faces and not national costumes, this is what the
photographer accomplished with his eyes, his mind, his observations, his
knowledge and last but not least his considerable photographic ability. Only
through studying comparative anatomy can we come to an understanding of
nature and the history of the internal organs. In the same way this photographer
has practised comparative anatomy and therefore found a scientific point of view
beyond the conventional photographer.5
IV. Conclusion
A final anecdote to end this essay, much too long already. Crossing the cavernous
main floor of New York’s Grand Central Station recently, I looked up to see the
latest instalment in a thirty-odd year series of monumental, back-illuminated
dye-transfer transparencies; a picture, taken low to the wet earth of rural Ireland,
a lush vegetable apparition of landscape and cottage, was suspended above this
gloomy urban terminal for human traffic. With this image - seemingly bigger
and more illusionistic, even in its stillness, than Cinerama - everything that is
1 [footnote 8 in source] See Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre: The History o f the
Diorama and the Daguerreotype (New York, 1968) 88,99.
2 [12] August Sander, ‘Photography as a Universal Language’, trans. Anne Hailey, Massachusetts
Review, vol. XIX, no. 4 (1978) 674-5.
3 [13] Ibid., 675.
4 [14] Ibid., 679.
5 [15] Alfred Doblin, ‘About Faces, Portraits and Their Reality: Introduction to August Sander,
Antlitz der Zeit’ (1929), in Germany: The New Photography 1927-33, ed. David Mellor (London,
1978)58.
6 [16] Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42) in Auguste Comte and Positivism: The
Essential Writings, ed. Gertrud Lenzer (New York, 1975).
7 [19] Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter (London, 1792) 13.
8 [20] Anne Hailey, ‘August Sander', Massachusetts Review, vol. XIX, no. 4 (1978) 663-73. See also
Robert Kramer, ‘Historical Commentary’, in August Sander: Photographs o f an Epoch (Philadelphia,
1980) 11-38, for a discussion of Sander’s relation to physiognomic traditions.
9 [22] Sander, ‘Photography as a Universal Language’, op. cit., 678.
10 [27] See Talcott Parsons et al, Family, Socialization and Interaction Progress (New York, 1955) and
the critique provided in Mark Poster, Critical Theory o f the Family (New York, 1978) 78-84.
11 [29] Carl Sandburg, ‘Prologue’, The Family o f Man (New York, 1955).
12 [51 ] George Eastman, quoted in J.M. Eder, History o f Photography, op. cit., 489.
Allan Sekula, extracts from ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, ArtJournal, vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981) 15-16;
1 7 -1 8 ;1 8 -2 0 ;2 1 ;2 3 .
The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes.
- Wim Wenders, The Act o f Seeing.2
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, extracts from ‘Unconcerned But Not Indifferent’, Foto8 (5
March 2008).
So, what does a photograph expose? It exposes, says Derrida, the relation to the law.
What he means is that every photo poses itself as this question: Are we allowed to
view what is being exposed?
- Avital Ronell, interviewed by Andrea Juno in Angry Women, 1991
The relation between aesthetics and politics was a matter of great contention at
the end of the twentieth century. Although too much of the discussion about it
consisted of apodictic pronouncements and invective dismissals, it was good to
have people arguing about it again. From where , there is heat there may
occasionally come some light. ^ ~ , s\*
s —i ^ «,r,r_ is
7 ^ 'jn T E C P CENTRAL
Levi S tra u ss //T h e D o cu m e n ta ry D e b a t e / / 103
When the ‘Culture Wars’ in the United States spread to censorship battles over
the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano and David Wojnarowicz,
the documentary veracity and political content of aesthetic images were put on
public trial. From the beginning of these conflicts, the right recognized what the
real stakes were in this ‘war between cultures and ... about the meaning of
“culture”’ (per Indiana Republican Representative Henry Hyde); they recognized
the subversive nature of art and responded accordingly. On the other hand, one of
the left’s most articulate antecedents to this trial was the ‘anti-aesthetic’ branch of
postmodern criticism, which Hal Foster characterized in 1983 as questioning ‘the
very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas’, including ‘the notion of the
aesthetic as subversive’, claiming that ‘its criticality is now largely illusory’.1
During this same time, the theory and criticism of photography was being
transformed by the emergence of a new, strong materialist analysis of photography
by writers such as Martha Rosier, Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and
John Tagg, among others. One of the most trenchant and persistent critiques
arising from this tendency was that of ‘social documentary’ photography, focusing
especially on the aestheticization of the documentary image. One measure of the
success of this critique is the extent to which its assumptions and conclusions
were accepted and absorbed into mainstream writing about photography.
The 9 September 1991 issue of the New Yorker carried an article by Ingrid
Sischy, titled ‘Good Intentions’, on the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao
Salgado. Sischy upbraids Salgado for being too popular and too successful, and
also for being too ‘uncompromisingly serious’ and ‘weighty’; for being
opportunistic and self-aggrandizing, and also too idealistic; for being too
spiritual, and also for being ‘kitschy’ and ‘schmaltzy’. But Sischy’s real complaint
about Salgado’s photographs is that they threaten the boundary between
aesthetics and politics. The complaint is couched in the familiar terms of a
borrowed political critique:
Salgado is too busy with the compositional aspects of his pictures - and with
finding the ‘grace’ and ‘beauty’ in the twisted forms of his anguished subjects. And
this beautification of tragedy results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our
passivity toward the experience they reveal. To aestheticize tragedy is the fastest
way to anaesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it. Beauty is a call to
admiration, not to action.2
The substantive critique upon which this by now conventional criticism is based
can be found in the classic debate within German Marxism that occurred from
the 1930s to the 1950s, involving Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht,
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.3
Are Galeano and Sischy looking at the same images? What is the political difference
in the way they are looking? In another part of his essay, Galeano (who was forced
into exile from his native Uruguay for having ‘ideological ideas’, as one of the
In art there is the fact of failure, and the fact of partial success. Our metaphysicians
must understand this. Works of art can fail so easily; it so difficult for them to
succeed. One man will fall silent because of lack of feeling; another, because his
emotion chokes him. A third frees himself, not from the burden that weighs on
him, but only from a feeling of unfreedom. A fourth breaks his tools because they
have too long been used to exploit him. The world is not obliged to be sentimental.
Defeats should be acknowledged; but one should never conclude from them that
there should be no more struggles.8
The assumptions here are clear: the ‘aestheticized’ (art) is not ‘authentic’, but
always already supplementary, added on to the ‘core of authentic practice’. It is
also supplementary - perhaps even antithetical - to ‘concrete social struggles’.
Isn’t this ju st the flip side of the right’s view of art: that art is inauthentic and
supplementary and politically suspect? The doctrinaire right contends that
politics has no place in art, while the doctrinaire left contends that art has no
place in politics. Both takes are culturally restrictive and historically inaccurate.
The idea that the more transformed or ‘aestheticized’ an image is, the less
‘authentic’ or politically valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously
questioned. Why can’t beauty be a call to action? The unsupported and careless
use of ‘aestheticization’ to condemn artists who deal with politically charged
subjects recalls Brecht’s statem ent that “‘the right thinking” people among us,
whom Stalin in another context distinguishes from creative people, have a
habit of spell-binding our minds with certain words used in an extremely
arbitrary sense’.10
To represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform. It presents a vast field of
choices but it does not include the choice not to transform, not to change or alter
whatever is being represented. It cannot be a pure process, in practice. This goes
for photography as much as for any other means of representation. But this is no
reason to back away from the process. The aesthetic is not objective and is not
reducible to quantitative scientific terms. Quantity can only measure physical
phenomena, and is misapplied in aesthetics, which often deals with what is not
there, imagining things into existence. To become legible to others, these
imaginings must be socially and culturally encoded. That is aestheticization.
When Benjamin wrote that ‘the tendency of a work of literature can be
politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense’, he meant that the
way something is made (its poetics) is political. Carried over into photography,
that might mean that being politically correct doesn’t signify much unless the
work is also visually and conceptually compelling, or rather that these two things
are not mutually exclusive, nor even separate. To be compelling, there must be
1 Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, in idem, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern
Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) xv.
2 Ingrid Sischy, ‘Good Intentions’, New Yorker (9 September 1991) 92. [...]
3 Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London and New York: Verso, 1980).
4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author As Producer’ (1934), in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography
(London: Macmillan, 1982) 24.
5 Eduardo Galeano, ‘Salgado, 17 Times,’ trans. Asa Zatz, in Sebastiao Salgado: An Uncertain Grace
(New York: Aperture, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1990) 11.
6 Ibid., 12.
7 Michael Palmer, ‘Active Boundaries: Poetry at the Periphery’ (1992), in Onward: Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics, ed. Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996) 265.
8 Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., 74.
9 Grant Kester, ‘Toward a New Social Documentary’, Afterimage, vol. 14, no. 8 (March 1987) 14.
10 Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., 76.
11 Karl Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill’ (1844) in the Collected Worl<s; quoted by W.J.T. Mitchell in
Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 186.
David Levi Strauss, ‘The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic? Or, What’s So Funny About
Peace, Love, Understanding, and Social Documentary Photography?’, Between the Eyes: Essays on
Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003) 3-11.
Phong Bui What strikes me the most about the film installation The Sound o f Silence
(2006) is that, based on the available news report and the photographer Kevin
Carter’s own writing, you were able to construct your own text that was concise
and effective. In exactly eight minutes, not only do we get the entire story of Carter
and his eventual suicide, we’re also reminded of the greater political struggle and
human tragedy, which has been more or less the central focus of your preoccupation
as an artist ever since you did your first project, Studies on Happiness in 1979. Could
you tell us how it came about, since there were a few years between when you first
learned of the subject and when the piece was made?
Alfredo Ja a r When I first saw the photograph by Kevin Carter published along with
the article ‘Sudan is Described as Trying to Placate the West’, on 26 March 1993 in
the New York Times, I was struck and taken by its problematic power immediately.
My first impulse was to cut it out and save it in my archives. Then, a year later,
came the news that Carter had received the Pulitzer Prize, which, only a few
months later, led to his suicide. And that was when I felt strongly that 1 had to do
something about this event. It took me roughly a year to write the piece, and so I
wrote it in 1995, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, but there was no
technical way of doing it at the time - computers had yet to become available. I
first thought of it being like a performance or a play. Then I thought about doing it
with a slide projector, as I had done once for a similar piece for the Rwanda Project
called Slide and Sound Piece, but it became too complicated, so I abandoned the
whole project and let it stay dormant for exactly ten years. Then, in 2 0 0 5 ,1 met
Ravi Rajan, who is a technological genius, and during one of our conversations I
told him about the technological difficulties I had with the piece, and he said he
could design a new programme that would control the text, the projector, the
green and red lights, as well as the flashlights, and that it could easily be converted
into one operable installation. [...]
Dore Ashton I always have found in your work an ethical component, or critique
of human behaviour. I remember in Andrzej Wajda’s Love at Twenty, which begins
with a photographer who witnesses a little boy who falls into the bear pit at the
zoo, he hesitates for a minute. Instead of saving the little boy he takes the
photograph; similarly, the ethic of the eyewitness photographer is engaged in
your piece. Could you tell us what you think about that predicament?
Ashton I read that there were 300 photojournalists killed in the last five to six
years, while many are still missing.
Ja a r Exactly. They are there trying to do work that very few people are willing to
do. They are trying to balance between these two impulses, and they suffer from
it. Most people do not experience this, and I am not a photojournalist, but after
my Rwanda experience when I was there among other photojournalists
witnessing the genocide, I wanted to kill myself. I was ashamed of being a human
being; I had to seek psychiatric counsel in order to cope with this situation. And
this was just one experience. Imagine that now these people live with it
constantly. They go from one conflict, one tragedy, to another. This is a very, very
complex issue. I do not have an answer myself, and I am not sure any of us do.
Bui I remember seeing the documentary made by Dan Krauss, The Death o f
Kevin Carter, at Cinema Village in 2006, which dealt with details of Carter’s own
anguish as well as his own humanity. The reason why that photo was heavily
criticized by Western audiences, as most of us agree, is largely because they saw
all of Africa encapsulated within that small frame. And the conflict arose due to,
on the one hand, that lack of understanding of the context in which the photo
was taken, and on the other, the benefit of its message. Don’t you also think that
it was an iconic image, like those we’ve seen during the Vietnam War? I’m
Ja a r Exactly. First of all, I think Carter’s photo is one of the most extraordinary
images I’ve ever seen as a human being and as an artist. And I totally agree with
you that the reason why it became so controversial is because it is too easy to
blame Carter for being the vulture, where in fact we are the vultures, the vulture
is us. We are the ones who are guilty of such criminal, barbaric indifference. And
the vulture didn’t need to open its wings to make that point.
Ja a r Yes, for twenty minutes. The truth is I’ve never seen an image translate so
much and so well the guilt of what is called Western civilization. I am always
reminded of Gandhi when he was asked, ‘What do you think about Western
civilization?’ to which he answered, ‘It would be a good idea.’ [laughter.] Again,
that image, for me, encapsulates that guilt and criminal indifference, because it
really reveals our real relationship with the African continent, which is continued
indifference. If you just look at the AIDS issue, for example, nearly 75 per cent of
the AIDS population are African, and less than 100,000 of them are getting
treatment per year. It is unbelievable. And criminal.
David Levi Strauss So much of photojournalism has to do with getting into position.
That’s what photojournalists do; they spend a lot of time getting into position.
Once they’re in position, they need to have everything working and be on: to react,
to get what they’re there to get. And in this particular installation, you put the
viewer in that position, in relation to the Kevin Carter image. I noticed people
coming into that space, and instead of sitting on either edge of the bench, they sat
in the middle, as if they were getting into position to have an experience. I think
the whole design and structure of the installation emphasized that position.
Ja a r Right. That’s why some people think that when the two lights on both ends
of the screen flash, they’re designed to shock them, and there’s some truth to
that, but my intention is that I am putting light on you, and you are being looked
at, you are being photographed. I am making a kind of transfer of looking into
while being looked at.
Ashton Andre Breton talked about the mirrors of inconstancy, without the silver
wall, for which all those startling images of human catastrophe are perhaps no
Ashton What do you think about the fact that there is always resistance to a
photojournalist, to such an extent that, not long ago, they tried to say that the
famous Robert Capa photograph, ‘The Falling Soldier’, taken during the Spanish
Civil War, was staged?
Ja a r This m ise-en-scene, that staging that some people do, is problematic. But
now, most of them have a very clear vision of what they want to communicate,
and sometimes they take this licence to affect the final result. And, of course,
there is a limit to what all of us should do. For example, if I want to convey x
feeling in one image to my audience which is thousands of miles away, drowning
in a sea of consumption from newspapers, magazines, the Internet, etc, etc, and
I feel that by moving this object one inch to the left, I will achieve my objective,
I think that is what they are thinking about. It is not gratuitous. It is not just
because it is a beautiful composition. It is more about how I am here, risking
my life to photograph this reality, knowing that it will never convey even an
inch of that reality. I am ju st making a representation of it. But while making a
representation of that reality, I am creating a new reality. Every photograph is
about making decisions. It is therefore a creative act, always. That is why some
photojournalists think that, in making these kinds of minor interventions, it
will help them to convey what they are trying to convey. But, of course,
sometimes it can be read as a manipulation, as insensitive to the realities that
they are experiencing.
Levi Strauss That’s what happened with the Los Angeles Times photographer Brian
Walski, who digitally altered an image of a British soldier and a group of Iraqi
civilians with Photoshop, which cost him his job. In any case, with Carter’s iconic
image, what viewers project onto it is their sense of feeling betrayed, not just by
Carter, Who took the photograph which they object to, but by the entire apparatus.
The apparatus has conspired to reveal their (our) true position of complicity.
Bui Yet they’re compelled by what they see because it amplifies their safety.
Levi Strauss Can you tell us about the facade of the structure [of The Sound o f
Silence], which is fully lit by vertical rows of bright, white fluorescents?
Ashton Some of my students interpreted that as bars of a jail cell, which I thought
was pretty good.
Bui Can you talk about how Searching fo r Africa in LIFE came about? [... ]
Ja a r What I’ve done for a long time is compile materials from various media,
what I call press works, coverage of certain issues. Searching fo r Africa in LIFE
shows LIFE magazine’s lack of coverage of the African continent from 1936 to
1996, and when they do cover it, which is five or six times, it’s mostly animals.
This is the most influential magazine in terms of making photography accessible
to the rest of the world.
Levi Strauss It certainly set up a lot of tropes that continue to this day in press
images - I mean images that become iconic still have to look like those that
appeared in LIFE.
Ja a r Exactly, and, most importantly, it gave most people in the US and the rest of
the world an image of the world. So, two or three generations were educated by
school, by their parents, and by the media, and the media was mostly LIFE
Jcsa r//In terv iew w ith P h o n g Bui, Dore A shton a n d D avid Levi S tr a u s s //113
magazine. I created this piece in 1996, but it had never been shown till last year,
and in this current show, I felt that it paired well with The Sound o f Silence. [...]
Ashton Your Rwanda project, which was such a hugely incommensurate event -
very much like what I’m just reading now in Claude Lanzmann’s autobiography
where he talks about when he did the epic SHOAH (1985), how hostile the reactions
were from the audience, partly because they didn’t want to deal with what he was
trying to bring to their attention ... I’m curious, how did you deal with yours?
Ja a r I don’t know if I ever really dealt with it, and that’s why the project went on
for six years, which was the longest project that I ever created, largely because I
wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was finding. I simply didn’t have the right
language to say what I felt when I witnessed the genocide. Normally I would say
barbaric, indifferent, but these are just two words that do not begin to convey
what I want to convey about what we did as a world community. Primo Levi
thought of this as criminal indifference.
Levi Strauss This is something that you really showed me, by encouraging me to
go back and read the story of Rwanda as it was printed daily in the New York
Times. And it was all there in black and white, from the beginning. It wasn’t a
surprise. It wasn’t as if people didn’t know what was going to happen. All you had
to do was read the newspaper. That’s terrifying.
Ja a r It’s the Security Council who did it, really. They were told that if they just
gave the okay, it could be stopped immediately. But, unfortunately, it would
never happen because of two factors: 1. Sadly, there is no oil in Rwanda, so why
bother, and 2 . 1 think racism is still with us.
[Audience questions]
Una Minnagh It’s one thing to take photographs on site like those of the
photojournalists, but when you transport that experience into a gallery space,
which essentially has to be orchestrated, aestheticized or manipulated in order
to draw the attention of the viewers to the screen, how do you balance between
the content of what you want to communicate and the way it is made?
Miriam Atkin I interpret the piece as a sort of series of deaths that occur on many
Ja a r It was Roland Barthes who said that every photograph is about death. One
way or another, it’s always about death. I think that the one I lament the most is
our own death as human beings. What I mean is that I am afraid we have lost
most of our humanity, we are already dead, or almost, as human beings.
Alfredo Jaar, Phong Bui, Dore Ashton and David Levi Strauss, extracts from round table interview
published in The Brooklyn Rail (April 2009).
[... ] The political understanding that many Americans came to in the 1960s would
allow them, looking at the photographs Dorothea Lange took of Nisei on the West
Coast being transported to internment camps in 1942, to recognize their subject
for what it was - a crime committed by the government against a large group of
American citizens. Few people who saw those photographs in the 1940s could
have had so unequivocal a reaction; the grounds for such a judgement were
covered over by the pro-war consensus. Photographs cannot create a moral
position, but they can reinforce one - and can help build a nascent one.
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are
a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images,
each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged
moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.
Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the
world in 1972 - a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American
napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming
with pain - probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war
than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.
One would like to imagine that the American public would not have been so
unanimous in its acquiescence to the Korean War if it had been confronted
w ith photographic evidence of the devastation of Korea, an ecocide and
genocide in some respects even more thorough than those inflicted on Vietnam
a decade later. But the supposition is trivial. The public did not see such
photographs because there was, ideologically, no space for them. No one
brought back photographs of daily life in Pyongyang, to show that the enemy
had a human face, as Felix Greene and Marc Riboud brought back photographs
of Hanoi. Americans did have access to photographs of the suffering of the
Vietnamese (many of which came from military sources and were taken with
quite a different use in mind) because journalists felt backed in their efforts to
obtain those photographs, the event having been defined by a significant
number of people as a savage colonialist war. The Korean War was understood
differently - as part of the ju st struggle of the Free World against the Soviet
Union and China - and, given that characterization, photographs of the cruelty
of unlimited American firepower would have been irrelevant.
Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth
photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what
S o n ta g //O n P h o to g r a p h y //119
which we have no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images it also
becomes less real.
The same law holds for evil as pornography. The shock of photographed
atrocities wears off with repeated viewings Ju s t as the surprise and bemusement
felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few
more. The sense of taboo which makes us indignant and sorrowful is not much
sturdier than the sense of taboo that regulates the definition of what is obscene.
And both have been sorely tried in recent years. The vast photographic catalogue
of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain
familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary - making it
appear familiar, remote (‘it’s only a photograph’), inevitable. At the time of the
first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these
images. After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached. In these
last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden
conscience as to arouse it.
The ethical content of photographs is fragile. With the possible exception
of photographs of those horrors, like the Nazi camps, that have gained the status
of ethical reference points, most photographs do not keep their emotional
charge. A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject
would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in
1900. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be
swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems
built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then
certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs,
even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
The industrialization of photography permitted its rapid absorption into
rational - that is, bureaucratic - ways of running society. No longer toy images,
photographs became part of the general furniture of the environment -
touchstones and confirmations of that reductive approach to reality which is
considered realistic. Photographs were enrolled in the service of important
institutions of control, notably the family and the police, as symbolic objects and
as pieces of information. Thus, in the bureaucratic cataloguing of the world,
many important documents are not valid unless they have, affixed to them, a
photograph-token of the citizen’s face.
The ‘realistic’ view of the world compatible with bureaucracy redefines
knowledge - as techniques and information. Photographs are valued because
they give information. They tell one what there is; they make an inventory. To
spies, meteorologists, coroners, archaeologists and other information
professionals, their value is inestimable. But in the situations in which most
people use photographs, their value as information is of the same order as fiction.
S o n ta g //O n P h o to g r a p h y //121
The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad
conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge
gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism,
whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices - a
semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is
a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape. The very muteness of what is,
hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their
attraction and provocativeness. The omnipresence of photographs has an
incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded
world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world
is more available than it really is.
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs
is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial
societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of
mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the
surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world - all these
elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs.
But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to
speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into
a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking
a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to
be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. [...]
Susan Sontag, extract from On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977) 16-24.
M artha Rosier
in, around, and afterthoughts (on docum entary
ph otograph y)//1981
We used to go in the small hours of the morning to the worst tenements ... and
the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst,
or turn anarchist, or something ... I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression.
One morning, scanning my newspaper at the breakfast table, I put it down with an
outcry that startled my wife, sitting opposite. There it was, the thing I had been
II
[...] The liberal New Deal State has been dismantled piece by piece. The War on
Poverty has been called off. Utopia has been abandoned, and liberalism itself has
been deserted. Its vision of moral idealism spurring general social concern has
Ill
It is easy to understand why what has ceased to be news becomes testimonial to
the bearer of the news. Documentary testifies, finally, to the bravery or (dare we
name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a
situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations
of these and saved us the trouble. Or who, like the astronauts, entertained us by
showing us the places we never hope to go. War photography, slum photography,
‘subculture’ or cult photography, photography of the foreign poor, photography
of ‘deviance’, photography from the past - Eugene Smith, David Douglas Duncan,
Larry Burrows, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, Dorothea
Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Robert Capa, Don McCullin ... these are merely
the most currently luminous of documentarian stars.
W. Eugene Smith and his wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, spent the early 1970s on
a photo-and-text expose of the human devastation in Minamata, a small Japanese
fishing and farming town, caused by the heedless prosperity of the Chisso
chemical firm, which dumped its mercury-laden effluent into their waters. They
included an account of the ultimately successful but violence-ridden attempt of
Your world is waiting and Visa is there. /120 countries / 2.6 million shops, hotels,
restaurants and airlines / 70,000 banking offices / For travelling, shopping and
cash advances ... / Visa is the most widely recognized name in the world. / We’re
keeping up with you.
This current ad campaign includes photographs taken here and there in the
world, some ‘authentic’, some staged. One photo shows a man and a boy in dark
berets on a bicycle on a tree-lined road, with long baguettes of bread tied across
the rear of the bike: rural France. But wait - I’ve seen this photo before, years ago.
It turns out that it was done by Elliott Erwitt for the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad
agency on a job for the French office of tourism in the fifties. Erwitt received
fifteen hundred dollars for the photo, which he staged using his driver and the
man’s nephew: ‘The man pedalled back and forth nearly 30 times till Erwitt
achieved the ideal composition ... Even in such a carefully produced image,
Erwitt’s gift for documentary photography is evident’, startlingly avers Erla
Zwingle5 in the column ‘Inside Advertising’ in the December 1979 issue of
American Photographer. [... ]
In 1978 there was a small news story on a historical curiosity: the real-live
person who was photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936 in what became the
world's m ost reproduced photograph. Florence Thompson, seventy-five in 1978, a
Cherokee living in a trailer in Modesto, California, was quoted by the Associated
Press as saying, ‘That’s my picture hanging all over the world, and I can’t get a
penny out of it.’ She said that she is proud to be its subject but asked, ‘What
good’s it doing m e?’ She has tried unsuccessfully to get the photo suppressed.
About it, Roy Stryker, genius of the photo section of the Farm Security
1 [footnote 2 in source] Jacob A. Riis, The Making o f an American (1901) (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1966) 267.
2 [5] [...] See Karl W. Deutsch and Thomas B. Edsall, The Meritocracy Scare’, Society (September/
October 1972), and Richard Herrnstein, Karl W. Deutsch and Thomas B. Edsall, ‘I.Q.: Measurement
of Race and Class’, in Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitz, eds, The Worker in ‘Post-Industrial’
Capitalism: Liberal and Radical Responses (New York: Free Press, 1974). [...]
3 [7] April 1974. (1 thank Allan Sekula for calling this issue to my attention.) The Smiths subsequently
Martha Rosier, extracts from ‘in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)’ in 3
Worlis (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981); reprinted
in Martha Rosier, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press, 2 0 0 4 )1 7 6 -7 ;1 7 8 -8 1 ; 183; 184-8.
Ariella Azoulay
Citizenship Beyond Sovereignty: Towards a Redefinition
of Spectatorship//2008
Ariella Azoulay, extract (retitled by the author) from ‘Citizenship Beyond Sovereignty: Towards an
Ethics of the Spectator’, The Civil Contract o f Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) 128-35.
Judith Butler
Torture and the Ethics of Photography//2009
[...] [T]he mandated visual image produced by ‘embedded reporting’, the one
that complies with state and Defense Department requirements, builds an
interpretation. We can even say that what Susan Sontag calls ‘the political
consciousness’ motivating the photographer to yield up the compliant
photograph is to some extent structured by the photograph itself, even
embedded in the frame. We do not have to be supplied with a caption or a
narrative in order to understand that a political background is being explicitly
formulated and renewed through and by the frame, that the frame functions
not only as a boundary to the image, but as structuring the image itself. If the
image in turn structures how we register reality, then it is bound up with the
interpretive scene in which we operate. The question for war photography thus
concerns not only what it shows, but also how it shows what it shows. The
‘how’ not only organizes the image, but works to organize our perception and
thinking as well. If state power attempts to regulate a perspective that reporters
and cameramen are there to confirm, then the action of perspective in and as
the frame is part of the interpretation of the war compelled by the state. The
1 [footnote 16 in source] A key exception is the excellent film Standard Operating Procedure, dir.
Errol Morris (2008).
2 [17] Joanna Bourke, Torture as Pornography’, Guardian (7 May 2004).
3 [29] Sontag, Regarding the Pain o f Others (London: Penguin, 2003) 65.
4 [30] Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977) 70.
5 [31] Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981) [...]
6 [32] Barthes, Camera Lucida, op. cit. 85.
7 [33] Ibid., 96.
8 [34] Ibid.
9 [35] Sontag, Regarding the Pain o f Others, op. cit. 115.
10 [36] Ibid., 117.
11 [37] Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times (23 May 2004).
Judith Butler, extracts from ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, in Frames o f War: When is Life
Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009) 71-86; 96-100.
S teyerl//A L a n g u a g e of P r a c t i c e / /145
have, on the contrary, exploited the occult potentials of documentary
expression. They short-circuit fear and superstition with the realm of
information. There is sometimes only a minimal difference between a piece of
documentary information and a stereotype, between a guide for orientation in
a complex world and wholesale judgements about whole regions and
populations. Information and disinformation, rationalism and hysteria, sobriety
and exaggeration are not clearly separated within these networks. The border
between description and confabulation blurs, and fact and fiction fuse into
‘factions’. The docu-jargons of the present immerse their public into a barrage
of intense affects, an incoherent mix of tragedy and grotesqueness, which
catapults the old curiosity of the vaudeville into the digital age. Ever more
coarse and blurry images - which show less and less content - evoke a
permanent state of crisis. These images create the norm by reporting the
exceptional, even unimaginable; they transform the exception into the rule.
Documentary forms partake in the arousal of fear and feelings of ubiquitous
threat. They inform panicked subjects as well as hostile and mutually suspicious
collectives. In times of a presumed war between cultures, they become active
players defining those cultures in the first place. The general uncertainty
catalysed by recent political upheavals is channelled into simplifying cliches
about others. Those pseudo-documentary images do not represent any reality in
the first place. They tend to realize themselves instead within the political
dynamics they originally helped to unleash. Stereotypical assumptions about
so-called cultures can catalyse dangerous social dynamics and align reality step
by step to its caricature.
But the documentary languages of the present also have a different function.
In an age of globalization, when traditional forms of the social are shattered
and national languages are downsized to local idioms, they offer orientation in
an ever-expanding world. Paolo Virno recently remarked that cliches or jargons
were not exclusively misleading. Rather than blatant misinformation, they may
also turn out to be ju st empty commonplaces.1 If we understand this term
literally, it also designates a site of common communication. A language based
on such com m on-places is able to transcend borders and enable a public debate
across them. But the real existing documentary public spheres are underlying
severe restrictions. As Virno also remarked, commodified public spheres are
not public at all.2 These public spheres remain lopsided; they speak in a
standardized industrial international jargon, but do not allow any participation.
The non-public public sphere isolates while it connects people to each other; it
locates people in the world by fanning fears of homelessness; it communicates
by simplifying; it is affective but only in so far as it serves instincts and a feeling
of general menace.
Optical Connection
However, documentary expressions are not only a possible arena of a public
debate. Their production creates material arrangements which organize things
and humans in ever-shifting combinations throughout dispersed geographical
locations. They connect humans and machines, images and sounds, hard drives
and desires. As common practices or as shared operational procedures, they
anticipate alternative forms of social composition. To work on these conditions
means to work on reality today.
Hito Steyerl, ‘A Language of Practice', in Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, eds, The Green Room: Reconsidering
the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1 (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2008) 225-31.
[... ] [Four photographs], snatched from the hell of Auschwitz, address two spaces,
two distinct periods of the unimaginable. What they refute, first of all, is the
unimaginable that was fomented by the very organization of the ‘Final Solution’.
If a Jewish member of the Resistance in London, working as such in supposedly
well-informed circles, can admit that at the time he was incapable of imagining
Auschwitz or Treblinka, what can be said of the rest of the world? In Hannah
Arendt’s analysis, the Nazis ‘were totally convinced that one of the greatest
chances for the success of their enterprise rested on the fact that no one on the
outside could believe it’. The fact that terrible information was sometimes
received but ‘repressed because of the sheer enormity’ would follow Primo Levi
to his nightmares. To suffer, to survive, to tell, and then not to be believed because
it is unimaginable. It is as though a fundamental injustice continued to follow the
survivors all the way to their vocation of being witnesses.
Numerous researchers have carried out detailed analyses of the machinery of
disimagination that made it possible for an SS officer to say: ‘There will perhaps be
suspicion, discussion, research by historians, but there will be no certainties,
because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof
should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe
are too monstrous to be believed.’ The ‘Final Solution’, as we know, was kept in
absolute secrecy - silence and smothered information. But as the details of the
extermination began to filter through, ‘almost from the beginning of the massacres’,
silence needed a reciprocal discourse. It involved rhetoric, lying, an entire strategy
of words that Hannah Arendt defined in 1942 as the ‘eloquence of the devil’.
The four photographs snatched from Auschwitz by members of the
Sonderkommando were also, therefore, four refutations snatched from a world
that the Nazis wanted to obfuscate, to leave wordless and imageless. Analyses of
the concentration camp have long converged on the fact that the camps were
laboratories, experimental machines for a general obliteration. It was the
obliteration o f the psyche and the disintegration of the social link, as Bruno
Bettelheim’s analysis showed as early as 1943, when he was just out from eighteen
months in Buchenwald and Dachau: ‘The concentration camp was the Gestapo’s
laboratory for subjecting... free m e n ... to the process of disintegration from their
position as autonomous individuals.’ In 1950, Hannah Arendt spoke of the camps
as ‘laboratories of an experience of total domination ... this objective being
attainable only in the extreme circumstances of a hell of human making’. [...]
D id i-H u b erm an //Im ag es in Spite of All: Four P h o to g rap h s from A u sch w itz //153
What do we mean when we refer to ‘Reason in history’? It is the state secret
decreed at the place where the mass extermination occurred. It is the absolute
prohibition of photographing the Einsatzgruppen’s enormous acts of abuse in
1941. It is the notices put up on the walls and fences around the camps: ‘Fotografieren
v erboten ! No entry! You will be shot without prior warning! ’ It is the circular sent
around by Rudolf Hoss, the commander at Auschwitz, dated 2 February 1943: ‘I
would like to point out once again that taking photographs within the camp limits
is forbidden. I will be very strict in treating those who refuse to obey this order’.
But to prohibit was to want to stop an epidemic of images that had already
begun and that could not stop. Its movement seems as sovereign as that of an
unconscious desire. The ruse of the image versus reason in history: photographs
circulated everywhere - those images in spite o f all - for the best and the worst
reasons. They began with the ghastly shots of the massacres committed by the
Einsatzgruppen, photographs generally taken by the murderers themselves.
Rudolf Hoss did not hesitate either, in spite of his own circular, to present Otto
Thierack, the minister of justice, with an album of photographs taken at
Auschwitz. On the one hand, the Nazi administration was so anchored in its
habits of recording - with its pride, its bureaucratic narcissism - that it tended to
register and photograph everything that was done in the camp, even though the
gassing of the Jews remained a ‘state secret’.
Two photography laboratories, no less, were in operation at Auschwitz. It
seems astonishing in such a place. However, everything can be expected from a
capital as complex as Auschwitz, even if it was the capital of the execution and
obliteration of human beings by the millions. In the first laboratory, attached to
the ‘identification service’ (Erkennungsdienst), ten to twelve prisoners worked
permanently under the direction of SS officers Bernhardt Walter and Ernst
Hofmann, suggesting an intense production of images here. These consisted
mainly of descriptive portraits of political prisoners. Photos of executions, of
people being tortured, or of charred bodies were shot and developed by SS
members themselves. The second laboratory, which was smaller, was the ‘office
of construction’ (Zentralbauleitung). Opened at the end of 1941 or the beginning
o f 1942, it was directed by the SS officer Dietrich Kamann, who put together an
entire photographic archive on the camp installation. Nor must we forget the
whole ‘medical’ iconography of the monstrous experiments by Josef Mengele
and his associates on the women, men and children of Auschwitz.
Toward the end of the war, while the Nazis were burning the archives en
masse, the prisoners who served them as slaves for that task availed themselves
of the general confusion to save - to divert, hide, disperse - as many images as
they could. Today, around forty thousand photographs of this documentation of
Auschwitz remain, despite its systematic destruction. Their survival says much
Georges Didi-Huberman, extracts from Images malgre tout (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2003); trans.
Shane B. Ellis, Images in Spite o f All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008) 19-20; 2 1-5 [footnotes not included].
Harun Farocki
Reality Would Have to B egin //2004
Harun Farocki, extracts from ‘Reality Would Have to Begin’, trans. Marek Wieczorelc, Tom Keenan,
Thomas Y. Levin, in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2004) 193-202.
Melissa Silverstein Why did you want to make this movie [The Greatest Silence:
Rape in the Congo, 2008]?
Lisa Jackson It’s an invisible story as a lot of women’s stories are, the horrific
tale of the systematic rape and mutilation of hundred and thousands of women.
It’s ju st stunning to me that nobody was reporting it. The New York Times did
one story on this angle of the war. But what they are doing to women ... not
only the militias from the neighbouring countries but the Congolese army
itself. I interviewed soldiers who were raping the very women they were
supposed to be protecting.
Silverstein It was amazing that when you were talking to the rapists how they had
a complete and total disconnection from the harm they were actually causing.
Jackson They [the Congolese army] see themselves as just ‘raping’ whereas the
militias are the ones who mutilate the women and fire guns into their vaginas.
But the end result is exactly the same. The women are shunned, turned out from
their villages and abandoned. So the end result is exactly the same and that they
parse the difference is just ridiculous, the disconnection is pretty profound.
Silverstein You made yourself a character in the film. Why did you do that?
Jackson It wasn’t something I was initially going to do but people who saw rough
cuts said that I absolutely had to because it was through telling them my story [of
being raped] that the barriers between us came down.
Jackson Here was this story, the stories of these women and no one was telling
it. It seemed important to me not to have some hand-wringing piece but to
actually listen to the women’s stories. These are women who are silent and to be
able to share their story with someone who was not judging them was an
experience none of them ever had. [...]
I am continuing the theme and have been to Colombia twice in the last three
months doing a film on displaced women. It is said that 60 per cent of the women
Silverstein How did it feel being a first-world white woman going into a third
world country?
Jackson I thought that through before I went. I was a white woman in the bush
with a camera. I might as well have been dumped from a spaceship. I thought
that as much as I could it was important to let them know I was one of them so I
brought photographs to demystify where I was coming from and I shared my
story of rape. They kept asking me about the war [thinking that rape only occurs
in times of war]. They asked lots of questions including, did your family know
you were raped? How was it is you got married? They were fascinated that I had
a boyfriend, and they were stunned to hear that I chose not to have children.
Their questions pointed to how different we really were. I feel an intense
responsibility to them. It was the rare woman who would tell me her story
without pleading for help for her and her sisters. [...]
Lisa F. Jackson and Melissa Silverstein, ‘Interview with Lisa F. Jackson, Director of The Greatest Silence:
Rape in the Congo’ (2008) (womenandhollywood.com).
Ben Kharakh How did you feel watching the footage as you were editing it?
Lisa F. Jackson The raw footage took a while to get translated and subtitled, but a
lot of the interviews that I did in the Congo, I had a translator there sort of giving
me suggestions of what people were saying, so to have it right there in front of
me and with the letters on the screen, I was removed a little. The hardest part
was listening in the first place and having direct eye contact with these women
as they poured their hearts out to me. Doing that day after day after day was a
tremendous emotional burden. I wept every day that I was in the Congo. The real
shock was actually having the rapists subtitled - the soldiers - because when I
was doing those interviews, I only got a rough idea from Bernard about what
they were saying and, to tell you the truth, I was in some sort of zone where I was
in a little bit of denial about being in the middle of the Bush with these kind of
drunk guys with their guns. So when I actually looked at their faces on the screen
and saw them looking at me, that was hard material to work with. It truly was
difficult, and it still fills me with rage and loathing when I watch it.
Kharakh You couldn’t understand directly what they were saying, but what did
you pick up from the way they spoke - just the tone and their cadence ...7
Jackson I got incredible arrogance - a sense that this was their right. There was a
pridefulness and a preening sense of self-regard, and a sort of malevolence. They
tried to intimidate me, but ultimately I knew that they very much wanted their
15 seconds of fame and that if anything were to happen to me or my camera, they
wouldn’t get that, so I actually felt that the camera, while it wasn’t the equivalent
of their guns, it was my protection. It definitely was my protection. And the fact
that they truly did want to brag about what they had done was evident in ju st
their posture and the way they spoke.
Kharakh Was it the fact that it would be a film that people would see that got
many of them to give their interviews?
Jaclcson Yeah, I think so. Nothing happens in the Congo without money. I gave
everybody five dollars, but that was hardly the motivation. I think the motivation
was to be seen, bragging about what they had done because they didn’t consider it
Kharakh You asked one soldier if they were doing it because of power or sex, and
the translator said, ‘These are complicated questions. He will not understand.’
Might any of these soldiers have been able to answer such a question?
Jackson I don’t think that they tend to be very self-reflective individuals, but it’s
kind of understood that it is about power. These soldiers, they may have guns,
but in a very real sense, they are powerless. The army is a pragmatic mess. There’s
no chain of command; there’s no discipline. They don’t get paid, so they take out
their frustrations on the population. They claim it’s about sex, but I think it’s
more about power. That’s an interesting question that I really can’t answer. I’ve
had men in screenings ask me about the soldiers, ‘Why do they do it? Why do
men do these things?’ and I say, ‘You’re a guy. You tell me.’ But 1 can’t answer this,
and I don’t think that they could either. [...]
Kharakh How did you establish connections with the women of Congo?
Jaclcson The simple universal act of exchanging personal narrative. You’re simply
telling them a story about your life and you’re asking them to tell you a story about
their lives. It’s the simplest of connections and it’s the most profound of bonds. I
told my story to all the women I interviewed because there were a couple of
situations, especially in the village, where they would line up to talk to me. The
need to tell their story was evident, and it was something that was closeted within
their own community. Maybe they talked about it within a very close circle of
other women who have experienced the same thing, but they didn’t have therapists
and they definitely could not talk about it with their husbands. And that’s if their
husbands were even still around. It was thought of as something that should be
hidden. The ability to talk to somebody who would listen to them without any
judgement and with sympathy was, for many of them, a new experience. [... ]
Kharakh What was life like for you after leaving the Congo?
Jackson It has pretty much consumed me for about three years. I came away
from there with such a profound sense of obligation to these women that had
Kharakh The UN had also passed a resolution saying that rape was a tool of war,
and your film was one of the catalysts for that.
Jackson Yes, the US Ambassador to the UN had seen the film and was inspired to
sponsor the resolution, and he told me so to my face. Yeah, it recognizes rape as
a destabilizing force that destroys families, it destroys communities, and it
threatens the security of nations. By acknowledging it as a security issue, it takes
it a notch above a humanitarian issue, which brings in medical supplies. A
security issue means you bring in troops and guns and make it stop, because the
ripple effect will devastate a country. [...]
Kharakh Do you believe that a moral obligation exists for people to become
aware of not only this issue, but also other issues of its kind, and to do something
about them?
Jackson Yeah, I think that people should not look away. I think that there is a
moral obligation, especially in the first world, to listen to others and to understand
what is happening and understand our connection to it. You also have to pick
your causes. The film is the ‘what’ and people who watch it need to figure out the
‘how’, if you catch my drift, because I can’t tell people, ‘This is what you should
do.’ The film motivates people in different ways. It’s been part of my moral
underpinning as a filmmaker to look at difficult stuff and to bring it to an audience
that hadn’t considered it before. [...]
Lisa F. Jackson and Ben Kharakh, ‘Lisa F. Jackson Interview: The Greatest Silence: Rape In The Congo',
Buzzine.com (2008)
[...] The Black Sea Files [video installation, 2005] do not share the US-centric
perspective taken by most of their authors. If anything, I hope to fragment and
disperse the concentration of power in current oil discourses and present an
alternative to the consolidation of power into a master narrative. Often enough,
petroleum history is represented as an uninterrupted sequence of portraits
depicting great men at the historical moment of deciding on war and peace. The
authorial narrative tends to amalgamate many different levels of documents into
one smooth homogeneous text. The hardcover master narratives are always the
easiest source of information to obtain. Data on more obscure events, remote
places, written in untranslated languages, are far less easily accessible. And there
are insights that can only be gained from being personally embedded in the field.
These FILES contain background information, media clips, personal notes and
interviews, as well as reflections in the aftermath. Above all, they consist of
numerous videographies recorded in the field during two trips to the Caucasus
and one to Eastern Turkey in 2 0 0 3 -4 resulting in the Black Sea Files video complex.
[...] In my understanding of the practice of art, images and text are inseparably
interwoven in their common purpose to produce knowledge. When I quote the
Black Sea Files, I refer to both my video and text research. To organize the material,
I opted for files because they are an open structure, a case in progress and not a
rigid order. In fact, files tend to contain a unique combination of documents,
whose logic often lies entirely with the author of the files. This has to do with the
personal circumstances under which data are found and new images produced,
encapsulating the unspoken chain of associations and links to other protagonists
and happenings. The unique logic might also be the result of a research trajectory
which doesn’t always follow scheduled directions. Seen from the outside, certain
events might seem coincidental and unrelated, but through my sheer physical
movement through the region, a connection is established and together they
start to make sense. The coincidence of being able to record this image rather
than that image will ultimately determine the critical videogeography which is
my project, bound to be profoundly subjective. For all these reasons, the file
seemed the appropriate structure for bringing a minimum of order into a complex
web of interrelations. The reason being that, in oil geography, every move is
entangled with international politics, every incident points to a string of histories,
branches out into further cross-references. The Black Sea Files are about the
Caspian oil, and the deep incisions made through the injured Caucasus to secure
Ursula Biemann, extracts from ‘Black Sea Files’, in Anselm Franke, ed., B-zone: becoming Europe and
beyond (Berlin: Kunst-Werke, 2005) 2 5 -7 ; 49-51.
A sound one hears in a film without seeing its originating cause is called an
acousmatic sound. How can we then call a sound of which, conversely, the source
is visible, but which does not reach pur ears? The two case studies that I develop
below will each address different types of sounds, silences and their workings.
The first case study is a still photograph of a scream/lament. My approach here
has been informed by studies on silent cinema, in which the image has been
employed to suggest sounds: the smoke coming out of the gun or the flock of
startled birds signified not just the consequences of the action of firing, but also
the noise of a gunshot. My analysis pertains to the following question: how does
listening to the sounds of certain photographs structure our perception of them?
Secondly, I engage with an online documentary in which still photographs
are accompanied by music and a voice-over. Adding sounds to photographs in
Seeing Rhythm
Ordinarily, we arrange photographs into sequences, place them in various contexts
- such as the family album, the newspaper, the exhibition - and create rituals to
make sense of them. Yet still photographs are also increasingly incorporated into
multimedia projects. This new form of visual storytelling, either linear or
interactive, is rapidly becoming a part of photography contests, museum
installations and online news platforms. The project by photojournalist Jonathan
Torgovnik titled Intended Consequences tells the stories of Tutsi women in Rwanda,
who fell victim to sexual violence used as a weapon of war by Hutu militia groups
in 1994. Close to 20,000 children were born as a result; most of them have
contracted HIV/AIDS from their mothers. Due to the stigma of rape, the women’s
communities and the few surviving relatives have largely disapproved of the
existence of these children. Torgovnik’s project resulted in a book with interviews
and photographs of thirty women and their families, a travelling exhibition, and a
film available at Media Storm (www.mediastorm.com), an online platform featuring
still photographs enhanced by videos, music, voiceovers and interviews.
Despite their culturally acknowledged ‘fixity’, it is important to point out that
the meaning and impact of photographs can easily be shifted by changing their
context of viewing, or, as happened in this case, by literally adding sounds. Seen
in this respect, digital photographs encountered online emerge from a complex
entanglement of perceptual and cognitive processes in which various strategies
of negotiation and exchange are involved. When senses other than vision are
addressed, the effects that these images have change dramatically. If we saw
Zaourar’s photograph as stripped bare of its sound layer, the case of Intended
Consequences leads us to ask what happens when we re-add sounds to still
images, and whether we can do this without changing their integrity. What are
the losses and gains of adding sound to photographs?
Although the documentary is about long-internalized silences, it has a
complex and elaborate sonic structure: there is (originally written) music, most
of the time a translated account is provided, and in several instances we hear the
women themselves, with a (female) voice-over, giving their accounts in
1 [footnote 8 in source] Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts
and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009) 4.
2 [16] Caption as found on www.worIdpressphoto.org, accessed 15 May 2011.
3 [21 ] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Marta Zarzycka, extracts from ‘Showing Sounds: Listening to War Photographs’, in Marta Zarzycka
and Bettina Papenburg, eds, Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2012).
Joan Fontcuberta [...] Among photojournalists there is still the sense that making
a photomontage is far graver than adding a filter. I’m against this type of hierarchy
that demonizes some options over others - in respect of what? Ideology, or moral
code? A bankrupt and fundamentalist ideology without doubt. Some years ago I
visited the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Its archive has among other
things the entire legacy of Eugene Smith. The person who took me around
commented that when assessing the original negatives one could see that
sometimes Smith made a montage of certain images everyone had assumed to be
spontaneous and direct. While making this confession she raised her hand to her
lips as if to ask me to keep it quiet. It was as if the revelation of this supposed secret
should be kept to a limited number of specialists, as if we had the obligation to
preserve the photographer’s myth in the face of public opinion. Some years later
Professor Jesus de Miguel revealed that many of the most famous shots one sees in
the Spanish Village series had been staged and re-shot until Smith was satisfied
with the results. For me, this information does not in any way devalue Smith’s
humanistic or artistic merit. I’ve always thought that the photographer does artistic
work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.
Christina Zelich [This brings to mind the moment when] you stopped using
methods supposedly employed to create a separate category, and went on to use
direct photography - the version of photography to which all the attributes of
truth are ascribed, the one that pretends to render a faithful reproduction of
reality. You did that intentionally, in order to subvert that idea, and demonstrate
the deception contained in that idea.
Fontcuberta It’s true that towards the end of the 1970s I began to get interested
in certain ‘places’, shall we say, where it is no longer necessary to fabricate
contradictions, because they are right there in front of you; all you have to do
is uncover and reveal them. And this evolution came thanks to a series of
successive anecdotes. My method of working when I was using photomontage
consisted in looking for appropriate backgrounds into which I would inject the
action of some actors or fragments of other images. But a moment arrived
when the backgrounds themselves interested me to such a degree, were so
evocative and mysterious on their own that it felt like the addition of other
elements would only diminish their enigmatic, poetic qualities. So I dedicated
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myself to doing a series of works where the manipulation or the condensation
of information was controlled by the theme, by the moment of actual shooting,
the light, etc. That is, by perfectly accepted photographic techniques that in
common parlance can be summed up in the notion of ‘decisive space’ as
opposed to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive mom ent’.
Little by little I moved into spaces that were not so innocent and that had
certain connotations. This is when, for example, I started to dedicate myself
somewhat obsessively to botanic gardens, zoos, science museums, all kinds of
places where Nature appears in an artificial context. Whether these things were
artificial for cultural or scientific, or didactic reasons, they were always about
taking something from its place of origin and putting it somewhere else and they
always created a surreal sensation much like that defined by Lautreamont, who
brought about that fortuitous encounter between a sewing machine and an
umbrella placed on a dissection table. When we find a dissected lion in the midst
of modernist architecture, such as in the Zoological Museum of Barcelona, the
situation provokes a cultural, ideological and aesthetic shock without any need
for the introduction of any additional elements. It constitutes a photomontage all
on its own. It’s not a typical arrangement using a laboratory and juxtaposing
negatives but rather a scenographic photomontage, because someone had the
idea of putting those elements together.
A moment arrived when my work basically consisted of the detection of
these kinds of tensions in various places and then moulding them; in this sense
I became a documentary photographer, or, better put, I played at appearing as if
I was a documentary photographer who made an inventory of these absurd
situations. And this calls into question what it is that we call absurd. The absurd
depends on the perspective from which one makes an analysis. [...]
In 1969 NASA photographs of the first astronauts to land on the moon had
documentary, scientific value, accomplishing a strictly informative task. We saw
them in the press, in magazines, in the media. But ten years later, in 1979, MoMA,
New York, I believe, organized a photo exhibit about space because they believed
these pictures opened up new fields of representation with their own minimal
aesthetic that linked them to a more conceptual form of documentation than the
merely formalist kind, that linked them with the New Topographies. In short, a
whole theoretical presentation. But in practical terms they chose the same pictures,
they matted and framed them, hung them in the institutional space of a museum
and canonized them as artworks. So already they had taken one step away from
the purely functional to the artistic, from the environment of an archive to a
museum exhibit. Photography begins as an informational medium and is
transformed into a work that people go to see, looking for aesthetic and emotional
values as a way of participation in an artistic experience. [...]
Sometimes colleagues say to me that what I was doing a few years ago made
sense because analogue photography did have the kind of charismatic authority
as a document that I was claiming for it. Today with the electronic culture, with
digital techniques, computers and the Internet, people’s sensibility and awareness
have changed so much. Everybody has Photoshop at home and even children
have fun distorting their own snapshots, so that the notion of respect for an
image as testimony does not have a leg to stand on because we have learned how
easy it is to manipulate images. To this I reply that, yes, it’s true that a cultural
change has taken place, an authentic epistemological revolution in the field of
knowledge and in the communications media, because the eruption of digital
techniques for treating images tosses aside the photojournalistic values that
have reigned up until now; but even so, and even looking at other areas that are
not exclusively photographic, there continue to exist elements of authority that
impose a determined notion of what the truth is. Don’t you think? W hether these
new elements come propitiated by a technological platform we call photography
or whether they are generated by some other type of technology is all the same
to me. I continue to focus on why we tend to believe, to deem credible, one model
o f information over another. What are the conditioning factors that elicit certain
reactions when looking at images?
In an interview moderated by Angelo Schwartz, Rudolf Arnheim said
something fundamental. Schwartz asked him: ‘What is the substantial difference
between photography and other types of imagery? How might one in essence
define photography?’
The definition problem is something absolutely crucial. We are, after all, talking
about photography but in practice we can’t agree on what it is we actually consider
‘photography’ to be. And Arnheim said that photography is a kind of image that
produces a certain experience in the viewer, that is, that it is not so much about
what we do or with what sort of mechanical device, with this kind of light or that
kind of lens, but rather the effect it has on the public; conveying a sensation of
verisimilitude that is not questioned. It is for this simple motive that we carry
photos around in our wallets to show the face of our daughter, or why we use
photographs on passports, or why the police use photographs as forensic evidence,
or why a biologist will use an electron microscopic photograph to show what a cell
looks like. If we did not have this kind of a relation with it, it would not be
1 8 2 //DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
photography. And so it is paradoxical because, according to Arnheim, what
characterizes photography is not anything intrinsic to its own language, nothing
that particular in its own technique or formation, but only an attribute that is social
and cultural, something historically and ideologically stamped.
What defines photography are its own atavisms. [...]
It could be that occasionally we lose some of the confidence we normally
concede to photography, but we pass it on to another element. The question is,
where did the confidence we had before in photography go, and did it really merit
such confidence in the first place? In the final analysis I believe my artistic role
consists in being an observer of what it is that gives us that sensation of confidence,
and in calling into question the mechanisms that seem to guarantee it.
Joan Fontcuberta and Christina Zelich, extracts from interview, in Conversations with Contemporary
Photographers (New York: Umbrage Editions, 2005) 13-38.
Kutlug Atam an
Interview with Ana Finel H onigm an//2004
Ana Finel Honigman You never dramatize events; instead you allow beauty and
ugliness to be exposed through their narrative contrast.
Honigman Do you feel that you have or want to maintain an obj ective relationship
to your subjects and their lives?
Honigman What do you consider to be the effect of telling their stories to you
and being aware that they will be seen - or in the case of one woman in Women
Who W ear Wigs simply heard - by strangers?
Ataman I look at people like buildings. Instead of walls and rooms, we have
stories and experiences. As long as we can live these stories, express these stories,
tell and retell these stories, then we can stand up, the way a building stands.
Talking is the only meaningful activity we have. Once we are no longer willing or
allowed to tell our stories, we collapse into conformity. I like to look at my
subjects in this way. My interest in recording them is not a service or anything
like that. I am interested in their stories and how the telling functions in the
context of their lives. [...]
Identity is an intellectual thing. You can change it. You can change who you
are or your history by choosing to tell a different story each time. You can lie,
like Semiha [the Turkish veteran opera singer in Semiha B. Unplugged, 1997],
History does not live in the past; it only lives in the present. You select your
184//DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
memories. You select what you tell. Lies are more real to me because they are
immediate. Retelling the facts, as they are supposed to be told, means much
less. The facts are not interesting. Recounting facts is like creating systems of
documentary. It is creating catalogues. I am interested in a person’s lies because
of the reasons they lie. Those are far richer and more compelling than the
reasons they would have to recite the facts. What purpose do their lies have?
What result are they aiming for? I am not referring to lies as moral issues, but
simply as non-truths. [...]
Honigman How do these stories translate from one language to the subtitles?
How do you think the experience is altered? Specifically in Women Who W ear
Wigs, where the voices mix, leaving it unclear whose voice tells which story.
Kutlug Ataman and Ana Finel Honigman, extracts from ‘What the Structure Defines: An Interview
with Kutlug Ataman’, Art Journal, vol. 63, no. 1 (Spring 2004) 78-86.
Sean Snyder
Marriot Hotel Islam ab ad //2008
‘It’s just like in a movie’ is a much-heard cliche about the images of the 9/11
attack on the World Trade Center. But this is only partly true, and increasingly
less so. The effects are like in a movie, the images are not. Most Hollywood films
are shot on 35mm film or HD video; but many of the now familiar iconic images
of the 9/11 attack were captured by amateurs and television news bureaus
overlooking the skyline of New York City. In addition, the images were viewed
and distributed on television and later the Internet, not on the big screen.
Hollywood has, of course, long been associated with apocalyptic images and,
on more than one occasion, has even been accused of contributing to the events
of 9/11. Today amateurs continue to edit and reproduce the dramatic impact of
those images into existing footage, in some instances resulting in ‘new’ videos
that generate re-readings and reinterpretation of the events of 9/11. The
cumulative effort of amateur post-production posted on video sharing sites such
as YouTube reconnects memory and time, while in the process potentially
constructing false recollections.
I would like to emphasize that I am not directly addressing the politics of
images, but rather want to engage in a subjective analysis of the visual surfaces
ideology produces. As an artist I am currently working with the malleability of
images and the technical mechanics of their production. As images replace textual
information - taking the temporal nature of those images, to consideration - they
must be increasingly unconventional to have an impact. Not to say that we are
entirely desensitized to spectacular acts of terror, but we are somehow conditioned
186//DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
to read the various subtexts for meaning. That is to say, we search for what
distinguishes these images from our familiar environment and cognition.
While watching YouTube I was reminded of the Cold War-era film Red Dawn.
Set in a small Midwestern American town under Soviet and Cuban occupation,
the film enacts the unthinkable under detente. Playing on the ominous threat of
nuclear warfare, the film depicts an unconventional invasion initiated by
disguised commercial airliners followed by ground troops. Local teenagers form
a guerrilla resistance to fight in an act of self-preservation and patriotism. In this
case the narrative seems obliquely to resemble the method used by the terrorists
on 9/11, with no option, however, for heroics on the part of the citizens, with the
planes themselves being the weapons. [...]
Shortly following the events of 9/11 we were exposed to a number of vivid
descriptions of everyday life in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime invoked by
the Western media: hanging televisions, trees draped in videotape pulled from
cassettes and ‘executed computers’ in the streets of Kabul, alluding to the
unthinkable actions of ‘the other’.
For years following 9/11, the Western media often referred to the jihadists’
release of ‘videotapes,’ implying their use of archaic or inferior technology in
the production of their messages. It seems doubtful, however, that at a certain
point any traditional audiotape, videotape or film was used in the production
or distribution of A1 Qaeda’s materials (for instance by As Sahab, A1 Qaeda’s
media wing).
We were constantly told by unknown ‘experts’ and well-known agencies
what we were seeing or should be seeing. Take, for example, the continued
mention of the specific positioning of Osama Bin Laden’s watch on his wrist
indicating ‘further attacks’. In other words, experts are supposed to create a
narrative, to construct a certain meaning of the image. However, there is a
common and quite limited rhetoric, which could be extracted from an expert’s
discourse; it shows how our notion of credibility is based not on the old idea that
‘seeing is believing’, but rather on abstracted constructions of meaning.
A few years ago I worked on a project which entailed comparing the image
production of the US Department of Defence to that of A1 Qaeda. I will outline
a series of speculative interpretations based on this research, exploring some
aspects of these ‘complicated constructions’ of meaning that have to do with
the amateur video production that A1 Qaeda tactically implemented in its
propaganda strategies.
As a side note: in 2008 there was a remarkable decrease in the release of videos
by A1 Qaeda which seems to imply that they don’t intend to produce sequels.
A short scene from a 2005 A1 Qaeda release includes footage of the operation
of a video camera recorded by a second camera. Once slowed down, the camera
188//DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
verisimilitude, which depends less on the high level of technology and
professionalism than on a certain emotive trust on the side of the subject/viewer.
Furthermore, it could be said that the underlying aesthetics of current imaging
techniques play a role in establishing a sense of authenticity. Data compression,
resulting in the disintegration of image quality, gives the effect of actuality - an
imaginary quality, which in respect to its rhetorical effects seems more valuable.
Many of the A1 Qaeda videos not only provide a spectacular image of war, but
are also designed to give an ‘actual’ view into the banal and everyday routines
that lead up to the implementation of an operation. A video from 2005 follows
the regiment of an operation in Afghanistan, including details of everyday life:
cooking, their living quarters, instruction classes, bomb-making and field
activities. The 60-minute video suggests the implementation of war as an
ingenious and methodical craft. These images might equate to the antithesis of
the representations of American military power and technology, say that of the
Stealth bomber or the Apache helicopter.
In many of the As Sahab videos, the technical functions of the camera are
fully implemented: the infrared night-shot function illuminates operations in
the dark, the zoom lens extended to its maximum focal length traces the
movements of the enemy in pursuit, and Bluetooth is possibly even used to
upload video data. Perhaps this exploitation of the capabilities of the camera
makes A1 Qaeda’s videographers the ultimate consumers.
The Arabic subtitling of one scene in an As Sahab video from 2005 locates an
operation in an abandoned American base in Afghanistan. The jihadists wander
around the site documenting their occupation of the space. A short incidental
shot focuses on some paperback books on a table, presumably left behind by the
US soldiers. Once slowed down and the image data enlarged, the titles of a few
Tom Clancy paperback novels become legible. The plot of one of the books,
Executive Orders, written in 1997, revolves around a terrorist attack on the US
Capitol using an airliner, the unleashing of a virus on the American public, and a
presidential sex scandal. A coincidental identification or not, fiction and reality
here come full circle.
Sean Snyder, extracts from ‘Marriot Hotel Islamabad’ (20 September 2008), in Jelle Bouwhis, Ingrid
Commandeur, Gijs Frieling, Domenik Ruyters, Margit Schavemaker and Christel Vesters, eds, Now is
the Time: Art and Theory in the 21st Century (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009) 51-8.
Sven Liitticken [...] How do you see The Casting (2007) in relation to your
preceding works?
Omer Fast I guess the preceding two works focused on individuals whose
personal narrative somehow floats between first-hand experience and its re
creation. Spielberg's List (2003) looked at extras who participated in the filming
of Schindler’s List, Godville (2005) presented the costumed guides who work as
historical characters in Colonial Williamsburg. In both works, the idea was to
exploit an ambiguity central to these persons’ experiences: as narrators they can
recall an impossible past in precise lived-through detail; as witnesses they’ve
lived through real events that are nevertheless replicas. By cutting and mixing
the narrator’s memories with the witness’s reflections to a point where they lose
their signature instance and start to blur and intermingle, I was trying to open a
stretch of time of the third kind, if you will, one that plays with the normally
fixed notions of past and present, authentic and copy. Another feature common
to the previous two works is that both looked at historical events through how
they’ve been re-enacted in the public domain. Since the Hollywood film and the
living-history museum obviously preceded my filming (both are famous and
discrete spectacles in their own right) they can be handled like found objects or
readymades. This gives me the split-subject I like so very much: namely the
duped/duping witness. It allows me to look at historical events by looking at how
they’ve been portrayed publicly and remembered privately, critically after the
fact, by those who have ‘been there,’ on-location for their re-creation. [... ]
In The Casting, I think this logic is turned on its head. To begin with, there is
no big-time re-enactm ent to hark back to. There are certainly genre conventions
and plenty of media depictions of romance and war that come to mind, ones to
borrow or to avoid. Nevertheless, the young Army sergeant’s storytelling is
personal, spontaneous and genuine. Of course he becomes an actor in the sense
that anyone who agrees to sit in front of a camera does. But the past he describes
is his own, narrated in two separate stories: one takes place near Baghdad and
involves a violent attack; the other is a romantic liaison with a girl in Bavaria. As
a script, the two stories are woven together to produce a hybrid that swings back
and forth between time, place and feeling. Still, each story retains its distinct
setting and, more crucially, each draws on a chain of events whose occurrence is
not questioned. Finally, since The Casting isn’t based on an already-made re
190//DQCUMENTARY FICTIONS
enactment, this leaves me room to move in and produce one. I’ve been wanting
to do this for a long time, not least because I’d grown tired of the sort of easy
media critique that basing a work on a Hollywood film, for example, seems to
welcome. In this respect, I think The Casting represents somewhat of a turn for
me. It still provides the evidence of the ‘documentary’, the encounter with the
real that’s been so important to me in previous projects. But it simultaneously
presents its own dramatization of that encounter: recreating the real by staging
the soldier’s stories as a series of silent tableaux, replete with actors in costumes,
several locations and props, and (horror of horrors) even a smoke machine. [...]
The actors that I hired for the project were told they would do all their acting
off camera and that they would be filmed still, like mannequins. In the beginning
they all stood around stiff and had no idea what to do. (Frankly, neither did I.)
After a while though, we developed a system in which they would act out the
scene, according to the script and directions, and then, at some random moment,
instead of A ction!’ I would yell ‘Stop!’ They were then supposed to freeze, to
hold a pose; whatever it was, and only at that moment would the camera roll and
the proper scene start. This worked out only some of the time. Very often the
actors would not hear me yell, or ju st pretended not to. (It’s amazing ju st how
much they’re into this acting thing, actors.) Some persons responded as if it’s a
game; others ju st seemed to dread the whole thing and cringed whenever their
work was interrupted. I was quietly cursing the whole thing at the beginning,
losing my voice from repeatedly screaming, ‘Stop! ’ Before we began, I imagined
scenes that would be magical, trance-like, still. What I more often got was
coughing fits, laughter, whispering and lots of high-desert wind. Nevertheless,
when I flew back home with the footage I was really surprised, especially by
those particular scenes that did not seem to work out on location. Unlike previous
works, editing took only several days. (And it was fun ...)
In the end, I see the project as a collection of the frozen awkward moments
that exist between an actor’s wish to identify with his/her subject and scene (the
cathartic objective of good old drama) and the vagaries of the real: wind, gravity
and the body’s ever-present desire to twitch, cough, fall and rebel, always at the
wrong moment. Strangely, this is probably the basic principle of comedy.
Fast The very idea of re-enactm ent strikes me as something that is fundamentally
about a contradiction: literally an attempt to cheat the clock, however illusory or
fleeting that attempt is, through the agency the body and its all-too-corporeal
(ultimately terminal) nowness. I think it’s really helpful that you point to two
caveats that should probably rank high in any re-enactor’s list of commandments:
the danger in detail and historical texture (the myopia implicit in ‘getting it
right’) and a kind of imperative to remain in the moment while time traveling
(i.e. not to lose track of the present when re-doing the past.) The thing is, when
you visit Colonial Williamsburg, their very motto - coined eighty years ago,
probably by their strangely-named founder, the Right Rev. Dr W.A.R. Goodwin, is
- ‘that the future may learn from the past’. Almost everybody I met in the two
intense weeks I spent there from the professionals working in historical drag to
the amateur clubs that convened over the weekend for re-enacting the town’s
1781 occupation, was impressively articulate about (A) the larger historical
context that they were portraying, and (B) the weird echoes that still play out
today (as you say, history erupting in our present, the past haunting the now.) For
whatever it’s worth, I left town with a lot more understanding and respect for
what these people are doing. More importantly though, I also left town with a lot
less certainty about what their audience experiences: what actually happens to
them when they enter the museum and start to time travel?
Lutticken For the past two years or so 1 have felt that the status of re-enactment
as a time-based activity needs to be investigated further. What happens when
historicism is set in motion - first in theatre and pageants, then in film, in ‘living
history’ museums and in ‘modern’ re-enactment since the 1960s? You mention
the agency of the body and its nowness as a crucial factor; I think one has to see
this bodily time as being engaged in a perpetual dialectic with mental duration,
if I am permitted to sound a pop-Bergsonian note. Together both form the
complicated time of the subject, which in a re-enactm ent is articulated by means
that are proper to drama, such as the creation of suspense. Since the drama in
question is historical in nature, this dramatic time is in turn short-circuited with
historical time. Thus various times are superimposed, and difference is
momentarily - annulled - at least in the ideal scenario posited by some war re
enactors. With film it is different; even though war re-enactors participate as
extras in films such as Saving Private Ryan, they are often sceptical about what
they see as inauthentic and merely external spectacle.
1 9 2 //DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
By the way, I think it is suggestive that we are using the term time travel, and
that the motif of time travel in modern fiction (time travel with a machine to a
destination of your choice) is a late nineteenth-century invention. In nineteenth-
century historicism there is already the desire to make the past present, to bring
it close through objects and architecture or through fictional characters that put
modern sentiments into, for instance, mediaeval knights. Walter Benjamin noted
that nineteenth-century interiors aimed to give the bourgeoisie the impression
that a historical event such as the crowning or the murder of an emperor could
have taken place in the adjoining room - historicist armchair time-travel! Such
craving for experiencing the past in a fundamentally dramatic way is amplified
both in parks such as Colonial Williamsburg and in war re-enactment, which
cater to desire for direct experience in different ways, allowing for different
degrees of socio-political contextualization. As your remark about Colonial
Williamsburg suggests, such museums place much more emphasis on historical
context and on contemporary relevance than fanatical hobby re-enactors who
are after a ‘period rush’; who really want to immerse themselves in a period and,
more specifically, in a simulated war situation. On the other hand, some right-
wing war re-enactors dream of having the past erupt into the present in a rather
sinister way: in a recent BBC report on neo-Nazi infiltration in World War II re
enactment groups, an SS re-enactor was filmed with a hidden camera saying that
if the SS still existed and if he was younger, he would join them to rid the country
of Muslims. I think the fantasy of a contemporary anti-Islam SS is as telling as the
two ‘ifs’ in this statement. It’s like double time travel; he imagines traveling to an
alternative present via the past. This suggests, by the way, that the time travel
starts in the mind, and that physical re-enactments are attempts to actualize this
mental experience, to anchor duration in the time of the body - to use the bodily
experience to experience a more complete superimposition of times. Perhaps in
the nineteenth century the act of reading a Walter Scott novel was the ultimate
re-enactment, supremely intangible. [...]
Omer Fast and Sven Lutticken, extracts from email dialogue (2007), in Omer Fast: The Casting
(Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien/Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther Konig, 2007) 27-41.
Alan Gilbert All the work you produce is organized under the rubric of a fictional
collective called the Atlas Group that’s based, as you are, in New York and Beirut.
Reviews of exhibitions that include your work may mention the Atlas Group but
almost never mention you by name. Recently you’ve begun to emphasize your
individual authorship of the work without abandoning the Atlas Group conceit.
Can you talk about the tension in your work between individual authorship and
the idea that the Atlas Group is collectively producing and accumulating
anonymous and pseudonymous documents?
Walid Raad It seems to me that this question concerns the authorship of the
Atlas Group project and its archive - documents attributed to Dr Fadl Fakhouri,
Souheil Bachar, Operator #17, and the Atlas Group, among others. It is not true
that I have recently begun to emphasize the individual authorship of the work. In
different places and at different times I have called the Atlas Group an imaginary
foundation, a foundation I established in 1976 and a foundation established in
1976 by Maha Traboulsi. In Lebanon in 1 9 9 9 ,1 stated, ‘The Atlas Group is a non
profit foundation established in Beirut in 1967.’ In New York in 2 0 0 0 and in Beirut
in 2 0 0 2 ,1 stated, ‘The Atlas Group is an imaginary foundation that I established
in 1999.’ I say different things at different times and in different places according
to personal, historical, cultural and political considerations with regard to the
geographical location and my personal and professional relation with the
audience and how much they know about the political, economic and cultural
histories of Lebanon, the wars in Lebanon, the Middle East, and contemporary
art. I also always mention in exhibitions and lectures that the Atlas Group
documents are ones that I produced and that I attribute to various imaginary
individuals. But even this direct statement fails, in many instances, to make
evident for readers or an audience the imaginary nature of the Atlas Group and
its documents. This confirms to me the weighty associations with authority and
authenticity of certain modes of address (the lecture, the conference) and display
(the white walls of a museum or gallery, vinyl text, the picture frame), modes
that I choose to lean on and play with at the same time.
It is also important for us to note that the truth of the documents we research
does not depend solely on their factual accuracy. We are concerned with facts,
but we do not view facts as self-evident objects that are already present in the
world. One of the questions we find ourselves asking is, How do we approach
194//DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
facts not in their crude facticity but through the complicated mediations by
which they acquire their immediacy? The Atlas Group produces and collects
objects and stories that should not be examined through the conventional and
reductive binary of fiction and non-fiction. We proceed from the consideration
that this distinction is a false one, in many ways - not least of which is that many
of the elements that constitute our imaginary documents originate from the
historical world - and does not do justice to the rich and complex stories that
circulate widely and that capture our attention and belief. Furthermore, we have
always urged our audience to treat our documents as ‘hysterical documents’ in
the sense that they are not based on any one person’s actual memories but on
‘fantasies erected from the material of collective memories’.
Raad You point out correctly that it is impossible to reconstruct a history of the
Lebanese Civil Wars from this project. It is evident in Lebanon and elsewhere
that ‘The Lebanese Civil War’ refers to an abstraction. We proceed with the
project from the consideration that this abstraction is constituted by various
individuals, groups, discourses, events, situations and, more importantly, by
modes of experience. We began by stating, ‘The Atlas Group aims to locate,
preserve, study and make public documents that shed light on some of the
unexamined dimensions of the Lebanese Civil War.’ Soon thereafter, it became
clear that it is difficult for us to define precisely what this proposition means, and
as a consequence we stated, ‘It is difficult for us to speak of the Lebanese Civil
War, and we prefer to speak of the wars in Lebanon.’ Today, we refer to ‘the
Gilbert This notion of history as never on time saturates almost every aspect of
your work and I think is one of the keys to the subterfuge it employs. Moving on
from the exhausted postmodern trope of the uncoupling of the sign from its
referent, you turn this into a larger historiographical and even political issue. While
there’s a sense of despair at the inability to ever finally arrive - even in retrospect
- at a true historical moment, it also appears to be a liberating awareness for you;
hence the strategic misdirections in your work. But it’s a liberation emitting a
mournful tone for a lost and impossible object. Your recording of sunsets from
Beirut’s seaside promenade at the end of your video I Only Wish That I Could Weep
(2002/1997), and your haunting series of photographs Secrets in the Open Sea
(1994/2004), are good examples. At first glance, the latter appear to be beautiful,
pure blue abstractions, with a black-and-white thumbnail photograph situated in
the bottom right-hand corner of their white borders. The imaginary narrative
accompanying these blue photographs is that they were found in 1992 under the
rubble of demolished buildings in the Souks area of Beirut and given to the Atlas
Group for examination. Using a lab in France, the Atlas Group was able to extract
grainy black-and-white photographs embedded within the varying fields of blue.
These photographs were of small groups of women and men - all of whom, it
turned out, had been found dead in the Mediterranean Sea. The sense of mourning
in these photographs inflects much of your work.
196//DOCUMENTARY FICTIONS
Raad I think there may have been a sense of despair (even as it appears to be a
liberating feeling for us, as you note), especially with the works produced
between 1991 and 2001. We no longer feel this way. In this regard it has been
productive for us to read and think about Jalal Toufic’s books Over-Sensitivity
(1996) and Forthcoming (2001). The absence of the referent in our earlier works,
our treatment of the documents we were finding and producing as hysterical
documents, was not the result of a philosophical conviction imposed on our
object of study. It may have been due to the withdrawal of reality itself as a result
of what Toufic identifies as ‘the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster’.
Our project titled Sw eet Talk: Photographic Documents o f Beirut is related in this
regard. The blurred, never-on-time, always-to-the-side images we produced in
this project between 1987 and 1999 are indicative of this withdrawal.
It is difficult for us to say where we are today, but we have noticed a shift in
the documents we are finding and producing and in our conceptual, formal and
critical approach to the writing of the history of Lebanon. As Toufic recently
suggested, ‘It may be that a resurrection has been produced.’ This is clearly a
question that requires further elaboration. [...]
Walid Raad and Alan Gilbert, extract from interview, Bomb magazine, no. 81 (Fall 2002).
1. [...] Art as reflexive resistance acts on this exposed nerve, our hope of
redemption, of meaning overfilling life. However, its action runs counter to the
impulse that gives it birth, for if ‘bad’ art massages the ego, reassures and more
tightly binds to us the world as false vision, the world of fantasy and convention;
‘good’ art is essentially selfless. If ‘bad’ art allows us to colonize the world as a
reflection of the self, ‘good’ art does not confirm our prejudices or reassure us in
a deathless dream. It shows that the world is wholly indifferent to us, to our
suffering as well as to our desire. It supposes that through intensity of seeing we
may cut through to reality. The goal is to show - in its unique indifference to us
- the thing not freed from time, but most exactly that particle, that single unique
moment, the present. By apprehending the present, we rupture the surface and
continuity of time and cut through to other moments, irregular, uncharted and
singular. ‘Good’ art therefore is utterly opposed to the attempt to create timeless
and universal symbols, which join the seamless flow of history, bearing us
forward through an unchanging landscape towards death.
Photography, which has a particular (though not more valuable) relation with
reality and with time, can be seen as a means by which we may address questions
humankind must always ask concerning life and death, compassion, pity and
justice. The great danger in making photographs is of voyeurism. Passive and
masochistic, it denies the responsibility of action, interceding self between the
object and our aim. Reality is indifferent and our perception of it has no reward,
it is in this sense selfless.
2. How does this work in practice? The pictures that I recognize or respond to are
very few, they seem to follow no rule or formula, only chance.
I make pictures of people I know and places I live in. Maybe ‘people I know
something about’ would be more truthful. It seems paradoxical to speak of a
selfless way of seeing whilst making pictures that appear to be little more than a
diary. This is not such an uneasy parallel. As a sequence of events or the things I
did today, it is of no interest. I have never kept a diary nor have I been much
concerned by others. As a fragmentary account of the world and of people, it is
more interesting. However personal and intimate Chris Marker’s films, their
power is in the recognition of others, of the mystery of Kuomiko.
Maxim Gorky, writing about Alexander Herzen’s marvellous autobiography,
says that he created a whole province of people. Herzen himself emerges from
2 OO//COMMITMENT
his book as the most egocentric of men and yet the great power of his work is
that it is inhabited by others who our gaze follows as they move by, whole and
more singular even than Herzen himself. It is this acknowledgement o f‘otherness’
that matters. I don’t believe that one is able to penetrate another’s reality, or that
intensity or depth of description corresponds to such revelation. On the contrary,
I believe that the most that one can hope to achieve is the precise and accurate
delineation of the surface of things. All else is fantasy.
There is a passage, I think from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, where he
writes that he would like to make portraits that to people a century later would
look like ghosts. It seems to describe that distracted and terrible looking out that
occurs occasionally in photographs. Barthes describes a similar look as being
terrible because it is the return of the dead. I do not see it in such a way; in my
response there is a sense of pity, perhaps a sense of loss and of sheer longing, but
each time it is resistance to death that lies in the recognition of another. This
seems a sad litany of defeat, of failure and loss. It should not be, because in our
resistance we find solidarity with others. The feeling of recognition, if only
momentarily. The pictures themselves are not such sombre things, sometimes
they are joyous, sometimes funny. They recall other dreams and other memories,
almost familiar things just beyond reach; rather like a still from an unseen film.
The people I know seem to have about them a kind of heroism, not the
heroism of great gestures, though that may be there, but of resistance, of actions;
small actions in the world. It seems difficult now when I show the work to
reconcile the things on the wall with this man or that woman and the ambition
to tell of them. How stupidly I have made the pictures, how little they show. I
believe that each photograph should be unique and discreet and yet, isolated one
from another, how can they show the world entire and complex in its relation?
Too often, perhaps through my inability to understand, the photographs remain
at the level of allusion, of making about the world. I say that it is an inability to
understand, but I think it is more than that. I don’t believe that one can engineer
moments of intense being, there is no drug or mantra to turn to. This intensity of
being isn’t a recurring phenomenon associated with a particular type of landscape
or face that one might recognize and reproduce, maybe a cast of the eyes or a
peculiar paleness of skin. It is none of these. All that may be said is that it is
wholly unpredictable and irregular. Perhaps at the most one can be open to the
world, one can work, make things - however banal - to go into the world but
never to expect revelation. It is a modest aim, but this being face to face with the
world seems to me now to be no easy thing.
3. Some years ago I gave a lecture with John Goto, on the Czech photographer Jan
Svoboda. When later it was to be published, the editors cut out my final paragraph
Craigie Horsfield, statement (Antwerp, November 1987), in Craigie Horsfield (Cambridge: Cambridge
Darkroom, 1988) 39-41.
Boris Mikhailov
S tatem en t//1999
I’ll start with a confession. Sometimes I have a feeling as if I had been run over by
an ideological car and the words, like jumping frogs, are breaking free out of my
mouth, independent of me: developed socialism, evils o f capitalism, vast is my
native country, unity and contradiction, great experiment.
Since the century’s beginning, Russia has constantly attracted attention, due to
social cataclysms. Of course, it’s not entirely so. Let’s admit that it is not the Russian
situation itself, but the fact that a ‘world’ experiment took place there, based on
the German philosophy of Karl Marx: the building of socialism. Now the experiment
seems to be finished and we are probably witnessing its completion. And we’ll
consider that as a photographer I ‘documented’ periods of that experiment. This
book [Case History] belongs to one of the latest periods of that ‘great’ experiment.
After the brown and blue series I was going to create a pink one, which would
probably have corresponded to the revival of new life, like during a sunrise, when
the light is evenly covering the whole surface.
Returning home after one year I saw the opposite. Devastation had stopped.
The city had acquired an almost modern European centre. Much had been
restored. Life became more beautiful and active, outwardly (with a lot of foreign
advertisements) - simply a shining wrapper. But I was shocked by the big number
202//CQ M M ITM EN T
of homeless (before they had not been there). The rich and the homeless - the
new classes of the new society - this was, as we had been taught, one of the
features of capitalism.
‘Welcome to Russian capitalism!’ (Sorry, again it broke free.)
For myself I call this situation of the country a ‘zero’ state, because besides
the creation of the new classes, there is no advancement from point ‘zero’. The
dynamics of the processes became relatively constant. The internal energy of the
society is not directed to future creation. In any case, the perceived activity is not
enough to survive. (The amount of people is being reduced.) And because now
nothing is created, but each individual somehow personally faces changes, I got
interested in man and his surroundings. In addition, I got the feeling that the
processes in society have reached the next level of concentration.
I try not to photograph sensation. On the other hand, I try to take photos of
what really increased a lot. I only try to find unique things in this great number.
I have missed the moments with ‘new Russians’. There was a time when they
were not yet aware of their wealth and their position, as if they had remained
‘normal’ people. It was possible to take photos in their environment - they were
open. And very soon they started to shoot at each other and surround themselves
with bodyguards.
Then came a time when it was possible to start writing a book about the
other main feature of the time - poverty. The best way to depict it is to take
photos of the homeless. And this ‘chance’ (to take a picture of the homeless)
could occur, as it seemed to me, only during a short moment.
First, these were the people who had recently lost their homes. According to
their position they were already the bom zhes (bom zh = the homeless without any
social support), according to outlook they were simply the people who got into
trouble. Now they are becoming the bom zhes with their own class psychology
and ‘clan’ features. For me it was very important that I took their photos when
they were still like ‘normal’ people. I made a book about the people who got into
trouble but didn’t manage to harden so far.
Their feeling of social oppression and helplessness shocked me. I watched a
scene, when a young strong man doing exercises, suddenly, out of the blue,
kicked a bomzh passing him by chance. The other screamed. It seemed to me that
I even heard the crunch of his bones. Nobody paid any attention, neither the
people standing around nor the militiaman who was not far away.
When I was first working on the book, I suddenly felt that many people were
going to die at that place. And the bom zhes had to die in the first rank, like heroes
- as if their lives protected the others’ lives. And I took the pictures displaying
naked people with their things in their hands like people going to gas chambers.
They agreed to pose for a so-called historical theme. They agreed that their
2 0 4 / / COMMITMENT
photography history is ‘dusted’. And we have the impression that each person
with a camera is a ‘spy’.
The main three rules which somehow indirectly regulated the development
of photography were:
1. ‘On spying activity’: It was forbidden to take photos from higher than the
second floor, the areas of railways, stations, military objects, at enterprises, near
enterprises, at any organization, without special permission.
2. ‘On biased collecting of information’: This law touched the moral elements
of taking photos. It was forbidden to take photos which brought into disrepute
the Soviet power, the Soviet way of life.
3. ‘The law on pornography’: Photographing any naked body could become
reason for accusation. Actually at all our art exhibitions, until 1986, pieces
depicting naked bodies by modern photographers or artists could not be
displayed. Only museums contained such pictures by Old Masters.
Having these laws and their consequences in my memory, I was aware that I
was not allowed to let it happen once again that some periods of life would be
erased.
I’d like to tell an episode. A man was lying in the street with his head on the
road in frosty weather. It was night. Everybody was passing by. I came up to him,
took his photo. A woman turned around and shouted: ‘Why are you taking a photo
of him? Do you have nothing to do?’ I asked her to help me raise him, but she went
away. Of course, I lifted him up and helped him home. And frankly speaking I was
very happy that he didn’t even get ill (I saw him the next day). But what did the
shout of a woman, directed at me, mean? Better let him die than the photo would
be published? She was passing by as if not noticing and not willing to see it either
outside on the street or in newspapers. There is nothing bad.
Independently someone’s glance selects what this person needs. My
acquaintances, after having seen my photos, said: ‘Now we see these people
outside, while we haven’t noticed them before.’
In a book by the Japanese writer Kobo Abe, Person-as-box, a man put a box on
his head in order not to be seen by others. Bomzhes whom one doesn’t want to
notice put on clothes - their boxes - due to the evil destiny. And that has somehow
crossed them out of life. This book is not about them (or rather not only about
them), though metaphysically, having made them visible, it is as if it restores
their rights for life.
It seems to me that my personal uncertainty (it is not clear where I live - in
Kharkov or somewhere in the West, where I work, etc.), my instability in society,
on the formal level, has transformed the obscurity of borders between
documentary and scenery within the framework of the documentary. Different
vibrations of this documentary depend on the so-called ‘non-ethical impulse’
2 0 6 / / COMMITMENT
in that place and now people can be openly manipulated. In order to give this
flavour of time I wanted to copy or perform the same relations which exist in
society between a model and myself.
I don’t know exactly why, but after The Requiem, the idea stuck in my mind to
go on taking photos of the naked. Maybe I was driven by the old complex
connected with the ban on photographing the naked, which was now connected
with the notion of ‘nakedness of life itself. People got undressed, naked and took
away the barrier of their dirty, ponging clothes, built between them and others. I
was interested in what would happen to a face when a body gets undressed. But
sometimes they, simply as people of the ‘new’ morality, exposed their ‘values’.
When naked, they stood like people.
Coming back to the terminology ‘sense of life itself, I should like to give the
following metaphor. Something is lying, wrapped in something, for example, in
a raincoat. I touch it, the raincoat unfolds and one can see a baby there.
No, I don’t want to spy on those whom nobody would like to see. My touch-
request helps the model himself or the situation itself to say - ‘Here I am.’
Now it is important for me to say how the West came to the East and why I
used colour photos. Previously I used a toner that made a photo look like old. I
received a reflection, which corresponded to the sense of disaster and war - the
blue and the brown series. The colour ‘express-photo’ became for me the thing
which mostly correlated with the new time, in each corner a photo-centre -
‘Agfa’, ‘Konica’, ‘Fuji’ - was opened. The appearance of Western technology made
a colour album photo the thing that connects the rich and the poor. Both the rich
and the poor wanted to have colour photographs and there was only one
distinction: the rich could afford them, the poor couldn’t. The colour photo
became an image of the new life. And the poor having a beautiful photo can
state: ‘Now we also live nicely.’
It suddenly came to my mind that these colour photos are more like a rash on
the ill body. At the end I again have to refer to old terminology of the ‘evils of
capitalism’.
I suddenly got the image of a slightly mad journalist in international affairs, a
specialist in defining the ‘evils’. Returning to the motherland from his long
business trips abroad, out of habit, he goes on to search out the ‘evils’. This is a
research of the post-Soviet space made by the old Soviet method. The circle is
closed. And the experiment?
Boris Mikhailov, untitled statement, in Boris Mikhailov: Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1999) 5-10.
[...] In the film Episode III - Enjoy Poverty (2009), Renzo Martens travels to the
Democratic Republic of the Congo to tell the Congolese people that the greatest
resource they have is their poverty and they must take control of its means of
production. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonization, the inheritors
of the W est’s brutal history now exploit the Congo through media. At the end
of the trip Martens is exasperated by his failure to make a difference in the
Congo, and concludes his journey by offering a struggling plantation worker
and his malnourished children what he can easily provide: a full meal with
meat. Martens knows he can do no more. His mission has failed, and he leaves
the DRC to return to a comparatively comfortable life in Europe. Martens’
journey can be seen as a parable for the exploitive relations that characterize
virtually all Western activity in the Third World, and especially the DRC. He has
gone to the country to lift them out of poverty, made a film that he will earn his
living from, and given nothing but a meal in return.
Martens presents a troubled, critical view of how we - directly and indirectly
- interact with the Congolese, whether through aid organizations, African
governmental structures, factory owners who churn out commodities and
goods, and most importantly, through our selves. In his film, ‘the entire picture
is looking out at a scene for which it itself is the scene’,1 forcing us to stand on
a moral precipice reflective of our own actions, where we must look within
ourselves for the answers.
The director has blurred the line between his character, Renzo Martens the
‘Imperialist White Male in Africa’, and Renzo Martens the artist and social
commentator, to the point that the two are nearly indistinguishable. When he
touches a starving child’s protruding ribcage and instructs Congolese
photographers to get closer to photograph it, or when he flatly tells a subsistence
farmer how poor he is to his face, the film turns into an oppressive reality that
Martens the artist is responsible for. But few can argue with the idea that our
dominant, Western patriarchal society ought to think more about our relationships
with people we believe we are helping, for ‘good intentions may do as much
harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.’2 Our relationship with the
Congolese definitely suffers from our lack of understanding of them, but perhaps
it is first and foremost the victim of our profound misperceptions of ourselves.
This is not a call for the end of all aid or a total damnation of ‘Western media’
(both heavily over-simplified ideas themselves), but an appeal for relationships
208//CQ M M ITM EN T
built on self-awareness, love and respect. We can learn a lot from the young
Angolan man in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Rostov-Luanda (1997), who simply
and eloquently points out that ‘if I share a moment with somebody, and we laugh
together with love and tenderness, then if that person rightly criticizes me, I’ll
accept it’. There are definitely ways to help other people, but first we need to
acknowledge our role in perpetuating the abhorrent power structure. Then we
can shape our actions accordingly through love and respect, which are the true
forces of positive change. (Joe Penney.)
J o e Penney Although you’ve stated that your film is primarily an artwork, it has a
strong political message to it. How does Episode III negotiate the relationship
between politics and art, and what was your goal in making the film?
Renzo Martens Yes, it is primarily an artwork, for sure, and the reason for this is
that in the film there is a guy who does all these things: he says you are now being
exploited through media, and then we see that he, too, exploits people through
media. He just gives people a view and returns to a relatively comfortable life in
Europe. And then you say, and that’s the important part, that this is like a parable
for most Western activity in the Third World. So what happens in Episode III doesn’t
critique by showing something bad but by duplicating what may be bad. On the
one hand it gives some critique within the film: media might be bad, it exploits
you, takes possession of the means of production; on the other hand I, the guy in
the film, do pretty much exactly the same thing and in the end just leave.
So the film’s critique is not so much in Renzo’s actions; the critique is the film
as a whole, it’s the duplication of existing power relationships. [...] Most
documentary films critique or reveal some outside phenomenon - this is bad, or
good, or tragic... In this film, it’s not the subject, like poverty in Africa, that’s tragic,
it’s the very way that the film deals with the subject that is as tragic. So that’s why
it’s an artwork, because it deals with its own presence, it deals with its own terms
and conditions, it’s not a referential piece. It’s auto-referential.
Penney So the regular media does not deal with its own presence the way your
work does.
Martens Hardly ever. And it’s by dealing with its own presence that it's able to
reveal so much more, not only of its own presence - of yet another film made in
the Congo and who’s benefiting from that film and who’s not - but also, as you
said, it forms a parable of Western behaviour in the Third World in general. And
that’s why - because it’s an artwork - it can be political: it reveals so much more
of these power relationships, these discrepancies, than just a film showing that
Penney When you’re aware of yourself, then you have a more nuanced view of
what’s going on. Is that what you mean?
Martens Yes, more nuanced, but also deeper. When you’re aware of yourself, you
only have to study yourself, and you see why all these other things are going
wrong, too.
Penney You said in another interview, ‘I can never be the saviour or emancipator
because I am defined by the structures and institutions that exploit in the first
place.’ You said this I guess, because your film was partly financed by grants from
European countries.
M artens Sure, partially, but also because even without those grants ... I made
the films with grants, but I started out without grants, with hardly any money.
With around 30,000 Canadian dollars I filmed for over a year and a half. Then I
got some more money for another year. So it was done with very little money
in terms of what documentary films cost. But still, not only am I defined by the
grants, I’m also defined by the education I have, by the racism and the feeling
of agency that I’ve grown up with, I’m defined by the idea that I think it’s normal
that I have a cup of coffee every day and it’s normal that other people don’t
drink coffee but work for me anyway. I mean, so the institutions are not ju st the
grants. I am a representative of a world which allows people to die of hunger on
the one hand and allows other people to be terribly rich. That’s the institution
I’m talking of.
Penney So do you think it’s possible for someone like yourself to entertain
relations with the Congolese outside of these roles, outside of the saviour/
emancipator role?
Martens Yes. It will take a little effort from both sides, but sure, if you cut through
some of the prejudices and expectations, which I, by the way, have made into the
subject of the film (by making you cut through it, I guess), then yes, for sure,
there is no reason why a relationship between myself and a Congolese person, on
a deeply personal level - once we’ve transgressed all these prejudices - why it
couldn’t be as truthful and real, and loving and aesthetic, as any other relationship
between two people.
2 1 0 // COMMITMENT
Penney But it’s just that the structures and institutions which exploit, that you
speak of, make it very hard for this to happen?
Martens Yes, they make it very hard for this to happen, first of all because, for
example, any European or North American working for the United Nations in the
Congo works among people that maybe make 20 dollars per month - maybe
their own personnel make 20 dollars per month, yet they make 10,000 dollars
per month. I’m not so good at maths but this is a lot more. So, people feel guilty
about it and then they have to come up with other strategies. You have to think
you’re very much superior, otherwise there’s not much to account for this terrible
difference in income. It’s not ju st the institutions that make it difficult but very
much your own attachments to privilege, and to power and superiority.
Penney So do you think that to have more egalitarian relations with the Congolese,
you would basically have to throw away your privileges as a white male in a
Third World country?
Martens Well, if your aim is to have a deeply personal relationship with anybody,
yes, you have to let go of your privileges, in general, yes. In general.
Penney Susan Sontag wrote [in On Photography ] that the limit of the photographic
world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or
political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always
be a kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge
at bargain prices - a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of appropriation, a
semblance of rape.
When you look at pictures of the Congo, you get the sense of terrible human
suffering. But your film has a critique of this relationship between photographer
and subject, as well as that between the viewer of the photograph back at home
and the subject. Can you speak a little about these relationships?
Martens I couldn’t agree more with Sontag. She takes this further in another
statement I’ll cite as I remember it: Empathy as a reaction from the viewer
towards the suffering of others, as portrayed in film, is possibly an inappropriate
reaction, because the empathy allows you to disregard the structural violence
that is at the basis of suffering.
If you have empathy as a reaction, for example, to the earthquake crisis in Haiti
[in 2010], you think, these people have a terrible disaster, I should help them; it’s a
reactionary force. You see suffering, you want to help. Of course the people in Haiti
have been suffering for ages. It was the poorest country in the western hemisphere
Penney Does it create a sort of distance between the viewer of that photograph
and the subject of that photograph that’s not really so distant?
Martens Well it creates a distance because it ju st shows you suffering, and then
your reaction is either you feel empathetic toward this or maybe you don’t.
Maybe you reject the suffering or maybe you reject responsibility. But if you are
able to put the suffering and yourself on the same map, then so much other,
deeper action is necessary than just feeling empathetic. Because the suffering in
this world, as in the Congo, is not an accident, an earthquake that all of a sudden
happens, it’s structural. And that’s exactly what Sontag said. We are indebted,
our riches are indebted to this suffering in, for example, the Congo. And empathy,
pity, does away with all this need for structural justice.
Penney It distracts from looking at the real basis for these problems.
Martens Yes, it can offer an initial spark, and that can be good. But in the corporate
media and in most art, photography and museum art, it only offers that initial
spark because that’s enough to please the consumer. Nothing more is needed.
And going deeper than that would ask us to cut into our own flesh.
Penney And no one wants to do that because you won’t make any money from it.
Penney So, given the current state of Western media coverage of places like the
DRC, how do you see other, major, non-Western media coverage of events there?
While there is a lot of big, corporate Western media, there’s also more and more
corporate media in other parts of the world like al-Jazeera, Xinhua, Iran’s PressTV,
al-Arabiyya. Flow do you see these?
Penney So it’s more of a personal... well, it’s more what you know best.
Martens No, it’s not about personal or not personal. I ju st try to understand the
big common denominator of how these things work. Of course in the Congo you
will find diplomats, missionaries, journalists, who try everything they can, who
do cut into their own flesh, let’s put it that way. Who do try everything they can
to make a difference on a structural level. These people do exist, but except for
one maybe, they are not in my film. In my film you see the common denominator,
you see the rule, not the exception. I try to deal with the rule.
Penney In Sissako’s film Bam ako (2006), a Malian court hands out life sentences
of community service to the World Bank and the IMF ...
Martens Which is funny because that’s what they should have done in the first
place, right? Community service.
Martens Well it’s good to refer to the past, as you do, and maybe as I did in the
film, it’s very important. But we should not forget that it’s not only the past, it’s
right now. I’m in New York right now and if I go to a Whole Foods market, I will
be able - and not only I but hundreds of thousands of people - to buy the
chocolate and drink the coffee made in the plantations that figure in this film. So,
I agree we should talk about history but let it not be a way to not talk about the
present first of all. I don’t know if the World Bank should ... It’s a very smart
sentence because as I said I think it’s what the World Bank is supposedly there
for in the first place. [...]
But what you see in my film is that, in my view, there isn’t one single actor
responsible for everything. It’s not like the UN is responsible for everything, or
the photographers, or maybe a plantation owner. The problem is that all these
people take their own privileges too seriously. They attach to them. And I guess
many of us do, and as you see in the film, I do too. And I think that’s really the
main problem, on a spiritual level. If you look at it in practical terms, it is very
clear that people who deliver services should be paid for it. We supposedly live
in a monetary economy, I’m fine with it, but then let’s pay the people who
Penney So we’re not even implementing the rules we established for ourselves.
Martens Oh, for sure we are not. If [our local minimum wage is] eight dollars an
hour, how come our workforce abroad - because these people work for us, they
are our employees - how come they don’t even make eight dollars per month?
Penney Because then we would have to raise prices on the goods we sell.
Martens Not so much, because the biggest part of what we pay for a chocolate
bar, for example - the per cent of wages in that chocolate bar, in for example the
Congo, is very small. Most of the people who produce that chocolate bar and
bring it in your shop are paid decently. The people who drive the trucks around,
who operate the cash register, who do the advertising campaigns, who model,
most of them are paid decently I’d think. There’s only a few people in the whole
production process of that chocolate bar that don’t get paid at all, and those are
the people who actually grow the chocolate. So if we would pay them a decent
wage too, maybe it would be more expensive, maybe two cents or three cents,
it’s not a big deal. But there are some shareholders or corporate bosses who
prefer to put those two or three cents in their own pockets. [...]
1 [footnote 10 in source] Michel Foucault, The Order o f Things: An Archaeology o f the Human Sciences
(1966) (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 14.
2 [11 ] Albert Camus, The Plague (1947) (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 131.
Renzo Martens and Joe Penney, extracts from ‘“Enjoy Poverty”: Interview with Renzo Martens’ (16
July 2010), Africa is a Country (africasacountry.com) [revised for this publication].
2 14//COMMITMENT
R egina Jose Galindo
Interview with Francisco G oldm an//2006
Francisco Goldman I imagine that we should begin with a few words about what
is happening today in Guatemala. Hurricane Stan, the flooding, the terrible loss
of lives, the general calamity that is going to sink people even deeper into lives of
inescapable poverty. What did Guatemala do to deserve so much suffering?
Regina Jo se Galindo To me this question feels too deep, too heart-rending. As you
say, my country has suffered an eternity of calamities of all shapes and sizes: a
mortal conquest, the maltreatment of indigenous villages and the negation of
their rights throughout our entire history, the Gringo intervention, an infernal
36-year war, evil governments, spine-chilling levels of corruption, a murderous
army, histories of violence that are a daily nightmare of inequality, hunger,
misery - and now this, which unlike the aforementioned things is a natural
disaster. How is such karma even possible?
But you ask what Guatemala did to deserve all this. Perhaps the proper
questions would be: What haven ’t we done? Why have we been so afraid, and
tolerated so much fear? Why have we not woken up and taken action? When are
we going to stop being so submissive?
I feel impotent, unable to change things, but this rage has sustained me, and
I’ve watched it grow since I first became aware of what was happening. It’s like
an engine - a conflict inside me that never yields, never stops turning, ever.
Galindo It emerged from rage and fear. When it was announced that Efrain Rios
Goldman What was the experience of performing it like? When you were walking
barefoot through the streets carrying that basin of blood, stopping, dipping your
feet in it, leaving your prints, going on and doing it again, what were you thinking
about? Were you aware of people watching you? Is that personal experience, the
interior space - even the memory of having lived it - part of the work? Did you
learn anything unexpected from the public’s reaction? And what did you do that
night? After doing something like that, can you ju st sit down to dinner with your
family, then go to sleep?
2 1 6 //COMMITMENT
Guatemala is a country without memory. The people, with little access to
education, are easy to mislead with promises and the little gifts that politicians
hand out during election campaigns. The official party, to which Rios Montt
belonged and belongs, made a huge effort and had all the power to reach the
Guatemalan minorities, who had difficulty connecting the actual Rios Montt (the
presidential candidate) to the past dictator-president who was guilty of the
greatest crimes against their own people, their own blood. Every effort was
necessary, any help at all, it was all needed to shout out the truth, by whatever
means. After they were published online, the images of the performance were
then published in newspapers that reached various groups.
Galindo One day in April I was reading the newspaper, and I saw an article about
reconstructing the hymen. Then I saw a classified ad purporting to restore virginity.
I went to the advertised place, which was a bit seedy, and interviewed the doctor.
At that time I was working on an idea for a group show organized by Belia de Vico,
which was titled ‘Cinismo’ (Cynicism). I went back to the place with Belia, we
spoke with the doctor, I showed him my work, and we broached the idea of filming
the process. He agreed to do it for a certain amount of money.
I went to the clinic several times to observe the women who were patients
there. I spoke with the doctor several times too, and he told me the stories of
many of his patients. The majority of the patients want to regain their intactness
for their wedding. They do it to gain a certain social status. In other cases, children
and adolescent victims of sex trafficking are operated on so that they will fetch a
better price. It is preferable to buy a virgin girl not only because of her virginity
but also because it is considered better protection against STDs.
On the day of the operation, I went with Belia and Anibal Lopez, an artist and
good friend. The operation was quick. Half an hour. Painful. Chaotic.
We left, feeling happy that it was over. We talked about what to have for
breakfast. I wanted pancakes. In Belia’s car, I began to feel a warm liquid between
Galindo I suppose that - like everything I do - this was done for me.
Galindo I dressed as a domestic servant and went about my normal life. The
experience was extremely interesting right from the start, but as the days went
by it became quite difficult indeed. Guatemala is a racist, exclusive, completely
divided culture. Being a servant has many disadvantages. You’re a woman, and a
poor woman at that, generally with little education and dubious origins. You
aren’t worth a thing, and so they look down on you, and you go around with your
shoulders always slumped, and they speak to you always with that disparaging
tone in their voice. They barely deign to notice you, they won’t let you into many
places, and when they do let you enter, they stare at you disdainfully. At the end
of the month, my self-esteem was in the dirt. [... ]
Galindo The similarities lie along two lines. On the formal side I find it to be an
obsessive search for cleanliness and for synthesis, as much in writing as in doing a
performance. Conceptually, 1 find thematic similarities, like my dissatisfaction
with the world and the system in which I happen to live. There is a cathartic effect
in both my exercises, but it has different results for me, as do my experiences of
life. When I write a text, I make an effort to not involve more than my brain and my
emotions: my cry is not powerful enough to leave me exhausted. In the act of
writing, energy is diluted into a passive being. Whereas in the moment of realizing
a performance, something in which I am completely involved, it’s not only the
intellectual process of developing the proposal but also principally the energy that
I gather to carry out the performance. In performance art, everything is real action:
the energy explodes, reaches unexpected boundaries. The experience involves my
entire being and sometimes even the beings of the people present.
Goldman I am very interested in a remark you made to me last week about how
people on the streets react when they see your performances: whether or not they
understand it as ‘art’ or as more of a protest, they don’t find it stranger, more
frightening, or more offensive than what they see in the streets every day. (And I’m
not talking about ‘magic realism’.) Could you say more about this?
Goldman Everyone has heard about the horrific, unpunished and largely
unexplained murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. But it seems that
nearly as many women die violently in one year in Guatemala as have over ten
years in Ciudad Juarez, but almost nobody pays any attention to this. (Though
just last week there was a strong editorial in the New York Times about the murder
of women in Guatemala and the utter lack of an official or police response.) What
is happening in Guatemala, and why? But maybe that’s too big a question... Your
response as an artist, in your performance 279 Golpes (279 Blows), was very
moving. You enclosed yourself inside a grey cube and flagellated yourself. One
blow for every woman murdered in 2004. Terrible. The performance protests
against the violence of men - but it also has a monastic element, a sense of self
blame and penitence, almost fanatical, and riveting.
Galindo There are many theories for why so many women are killed in Guatemala.
Not all deaths originate from the same direct causes, but all murders are
committed under the same premise: that it is done, it is cleaned up, and nothing
happens, nothing occurs, nobody says a thing. A dead woman means nothing, a
hundred dead women mean nothing, three hundred dead women mean nothing.
The difference between Ciudad Juarez and Guatemala is that in Guatemala
women are not only killed, but first they are subjected to horrible forms of
torture, cut into little pieces and decapitated. I saw the hacked-up legs of a
woman near my home one day, and nobody paid any attention to them at all.
I cannot separate myself from what happens. It scares me, it enrages me, it
hurts me, it depresses me. When I do what I do, I don’t try to approach my own
pain as a means of seeing myself and curing myself from that vantage; in every
action I try to channel my own pain, my own energy, to transform it into
something more collective. [...]
Regina Jose Galindo and Francisco Goldman, extract from interview, trans. Ezra Fitz and Francisco
Goldman, Bomb magazine, no. 94 (Winter 2006).
220//CQ M M ITM EN T
Barry Chudakov
H asan Elahi: Surveillance as Storytelling//2011
Few people have as fully realized a Metalife as Hasan Elahi. Its necessity, a case of
mistaken identity, was the mother of considerable invention. In 2002, when he
stepped off a flight from the Netherlands, he was detained at the Detroit airport.
FBI agents later told him they had been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives
in a Florida storage unit. While subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he
wasn’t their man, Elahi knew after this detention he would be carefully watched.
So rather than avoid the watching, he abetted it. Instead of pushing against
constant surveillance, he embraced it. He sensed that his perceived necessity
could spawn a new art form: the surveillance of his life mounted as a museum
without walls. Elahi not only chose willing tracking and scrutiny as a means of
verifying and documenting every moment and every day of his life; he began to
continuously display that ‘work’ in a digital gallery that functions simultaneously
as database and witness.
Born in 1972 in Rangpur, Bangladesh, Elahi is a professor of interdisciplinary
art. Logging more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his artwork and
attending conferences, Elahi has documented and ‘lifecast’ virtually his every
waking hour since 2002. He posts copies of each debit card transaction, showing
what he bought, where and when. A GPS device reports his real-time physical
location on a map. Apparently the US government, while once mistakenly listing
the Bangladeshi-born artist on its terrorist watch list, has not abandoned
watching him. Elahi’s server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of
Defence, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.
Yet Elahi’s Tracking Transcience: The Orwell Project is more than the perfect
alibi. It is a statement of identity in the modern world. In this self-induced
Metalife, Elahi chose not only an exercise in artistic expression. His Metalife
became a way of being in the world, a survival kit cum Weltanschauung. But
especially, Hasan Elahi became a new kind of storyteller.
Throughout the past fifteen years, I have found m yself with one fo o t in art and
one in science, and consider my m edia to be databases and other electronic form s o f
information. I am intrigued by the w ay humans interact with this information, and
p refer to investigate the acceptance o f technology rather than technology itself.
In this new narrative Hasan Elahi is both the story and teller, hero subject and
harrowing object, text and ironic commentary. By pushing surveillance to its
logical extreme, by enfolding and enhancing its contours he deliberately courts
what most of us either ignore or avoid. He forces us to look at the stunning level
Barry Chudakov, ‘Hasan Elahi: Surveillance as Storytelling’ (30 August 2011) (www.metalife.org.uk).
2 2 2 / / COMMITMENT
Annemarie Ja cir
Ram allah, 15 November 200 6 //2 0 0 6
J a c i r / / R a m a ll a h , 15 N o v em b er 2 0 0 6 / / 2 2 3
Mohammed called ... I picked up the phone ... my voice broke. Crumbled. I
hadn’t realized my fear until that moment. Why couldn’t I speak? Why?
I didn’t recognize my own voice. I knew I sounded hysterical. I didn’t want to
sound like that.
Took another peak. Army everywhere. The men shooting shooting shooting
shooting ... god, that sound.
Emily. Emily in the back. We made eye contact. What could we do?
We were stuck in the middle of a shoot o u t... right in the middle of i t ... with
nowhere to go.
We couldn’t even get out of the car and make a run for it.
We’d have been shot down.
I wondered if they’d kill us. I wondered if someone on the street might duck
into our car for cover. But the streets were empty.
We stayed on the floor of the car for 20 minutes like that. I thought, really
truly felt, I was going to die this way. And I didn’t want to die like that. Totally
helpless. Trapped in a car.
The more the shooting went on, the more I felt my nerves turn to jelly.
And then ...
Bam! Our car was hit. I heard glass break. I covered my head. My head was
covered anyway, I think, for fear of the car windows being hit.
We were okay. Emily was okay. Carolyn was safe.
More time passed. How stupid to have my hands on my head. What would
that do? Where is Emily? I think I will die today. I am going to die today.
I peeked out. I saw the Israelis grab a man off the street and shove him into
the other van.
Then the undercover Israeli closest to us, in the van, decided to leave.
Operation over. He pulled towards us. The criminal. I stared at his face, my head
on the passenger s e a t... He didn’t have enough room to get by us, so he smashed
into our car and scraped his way by. The whole time I couldn’t take my eyes off
his face. He didn’t even notice us I think. Three women so close to him, stuck to
the floor of the car ...
We are all okay. Nothing happened. There’s a bullet in the car. It hit the back
of the car. It didn’t hit the gas tank. It didn’t hit the gas tank. We are okay. But
three young men tonight are not. And many, many more are not. This is nothing
new, nothing out of the ordinary.
A man disappeared this afternoon. Two men were killed. It won’t even make
the news.
224//CO M M ITM EN T
Emily Ja cir
Ind epend ence D ay//2006
Ja c ir //I n d e p e n d e n c e D a y //2 2 5
Annemarie’s phone rang - it was Mohammed (he had ju st gotten out 2
minutes earlier) - ‘Be careful, there are mustarabeen in tow n!’ When I heard
my sister’s voice, in the way she responded to him, the reality of what was
going on set in.
She was trying to cover her face and head because we were sure we were
about to be covered in broken glass. I have never heard my sister’s voice sound
like that in my entire life. Panic began to set in. But I was really hot, hot.
I rolled down the window. Annemarie locked the doors of the car. I rolled the
window back up.
All I could think of was my sister’s safety. God forbid anything happen to her.
I grabbed her hand. She was in the front, 1 focused on her back (her dear, blessed
back) as we huddled as low as we could on the floor of the car.
Shooting shooting shooting. My sister. My sister. That is all I cared about. Oh
no! Goddamn it! Carolyn is next to me. I am responsible. I brought her to this
place! Shit. I apologized to her over and over. She kept peeking to see what was
going o n ! I begged her to keep her head down.
Our car got hit.
I make a note of it out loud. So does Carolyn.
No word from Annemarie. I call out to her fearing that she is silent because
she has been hit.
She hasn’t been. More shooting.
Shooting continued all around us. I kept repeating to everyone: ‘Keep your
heads down ... Keep your heads down ...’
Panic began to set in. We were completely exposed. I peeked up to see Israelis
in uniform, now shooting in our direction.
I started trying to make a plan as to when I would open the car door and
make a run for it.
I peeked again, to see some Israelis beating the shit out of a Palestinian man
and throwing him into their van.
The mustarabeen next to us got back into their van. As we were in their way
they smashed into our car and sped off. Meanwhile in front of us and to the right,
the Israelis started to pull back.
Kids started throwing stones. They shot at us again. They started pulling
back again.
I started feeling a little safe again. Now we might have a window to get out.
The next thing I knew, the kids and shebab were alongside our car (they were
heading towards the wounded) when they looked in and saw us in there.
They were horrified. To see that we were in the front row - right in the line
of fire this whole time - huddled in the car. A friend of Annemarie’s stopped
running with the men, ordered us to reverse backwards, and helped us get out.
226//CO M M ITM EN T
We parked and jumped out of the car and ran into a space between two
buildings for shelter.
I saw a friend of mine. He asked if I was alright. I showed him the bullet hole
in our car that made its way along the length of the whole car and exited out of
the back.
He said we were lucky it did not hit the gas tank.
(I had not even thought of th a t!)
Anyway, in short, the Israelis came in - in the middle of the day - onto the
main street of Ramallah - the most crowded street and attacked us on our
‘Independence Day’.
We are alive and not injured. We are okay.
I do not know if the rental car insurance covers bullets from Israeli M-16s, or
dents from being crashed into by mustarabeen.
And so it goes, so it goes. Another day in Palestine.
This is not a story.
A small nothing in the larger context of what happens on a daily basis here.
I am sure it won’t be on any news.
Another day in Palestine.
Another Independence Day gone by.
But I am with a bottle of arak and good friends now. God damn. Damn. Damn.
What could be better after a day like today? Thank the god for arak. Thank god
for friends.
Annemarie and Emily Jacir, texts retitled for this publication; first published together under the title
‘A Tale of Two Sisters: Witnessing an Undercover Israeli Operation in Ramallah’ (2006)
(electronicintifada.net)
J a c ir //I n d e p e n d e n c e D a y //2 2 7
Biographical Notes
Jam es Agee (1909-55) was an American journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic.
Kutlug Ataman is a Turkish artist and filmmaker based in Istanbul.
Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and
Interpretation, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German/Jewish critical theorist and writer associated with the
Frankfurt School.
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist, theorist and curator based in Zurich.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are London-based artists who teach in London and at the
School of Visual Arts in New York.
Judith Butler is Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California,
Berkeley.
Barry Chudakov is the Founder of Metalife Consulting, Florida, and a research fellow in the McLuhan
Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher, art historian and Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
Harun Farocki is a German filmmaker and artist who has taught in Germany and as a visiting
professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Omer Fast is an Israeli-born artist based in Berlin.
Joan Fontcuberta is a Spanish artist based in Barcelona.
Regina Jose Galindo is a Guatemalan artist based in Ciudad de Guatemala.
David Goldblatt is a South African photographer based in Johannesburg.
John Grierson (1898-1972) was a Scottish-born documentary filmmaker, critic and theorist who
worked in the United States in the 1920s and in Canada from 1938 to 1945.
Philipjones Griffiths (1936-2008) was a Welsh-born photographer whose documentary assignments
included the Algerian Civil War, the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War.
Craigie Horsfield is a British artist based in London and New York.
Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist based in New York.
Annemarie Jacir is a Palestinian filmmaker and poet based in Amman, Jordan.
Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist based in Ramallah and Rome.
Lisa F. Jackson is an award-winning American documentary filmmaker and teacher.
An-My Le is a Vietnamese-born artist based in New York.
David Levi Strauss is a writer and critic based in New York.
Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) was an American writer, art critic and curator.
Renzo Martens is a Dutch artist based in Brussels, Amsterdam and Kinshasa.
Boris Mikhailov is a USSR-born artist based in the Ukraine and Berlin.
Daido Moriyama is a Japanese photographer based in Tokyo.
Carl Plantinga is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Calvin College, Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
2 2 8 //BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Walid Raad (aka The Atlas Group) is a Lebanese-born artist based in New York, where he is an
Associate Professor at the Cooper Union.
Jacques Ranciere is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St Denis).
Martha Rosier is an American artist, writer and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer and critic.
Allan Sekula is an American artist, writer and teacher based in Los Angeles.
W. Eugene Smith (1918-78) was an American documentary photojournalist.
Sean Snyder is an American-born artist based in Kiev and Tokyo.
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was an American critic, writer and filmmaker.
Hito Steyerl is a German artist, filmmaker and writer based in Berlin.
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Vietnamese-born filmmaker and writer and Professor of Women’s Studies and
Rhetoric (Film) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Marta Zarzycka is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Utrecht.
BIOGRAPHICAL N O T ES//229
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BIBLIOGRAPHY//233
Index Bourke, Joanna 144n2
Bourke-White, Margaret 63
Abe, Kobo 205 Braque, Georges 34
Abbott, Berenice 25, 26 Brecht, Bertolt 18, 93, 98,104,106,121,185
Abrahams, Lionel 48 Breton, Andre 111
Adams, Robert 43 Broodthaers, Marcel 66
Adamson, Richard 131 Broomberg, Adam 17, 98-103
Adorno, Theodor 104 Brugioni, Dino A. 162n3
Agee, James 13,29-30,128 Burke, Jason 21 n7
al-Qaeda 186-9 Burrows, Larry 101,125
Anders, Gunther 1 5 5 ,162nl Butler, Judith 16,135-44
Arago, Francois 89-90 Byker, Carl 62nl2
Arbus, Diana 1 3 ,125,125,129
Arendt, Hannah 152,153,155 Cage, John 173
Arnheim, Rudolf 182 Cameron, Julia Margaret 27
Ashton, Dore 109-15 Camus, Albert 84, 214n2
Ataman, Kutlug 18,19,183-6 Capa, Robert 83,98,101,102,112,125
Atget, Eugene 43 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 101
Atlas Group, see Raad, Walid Carroll, Noel 55-6, 62n4, n7, n8, n il
Azoulay, Ariella 16, 21 n 6 ,130-35,174 Carter, Kevin 17,109,110-11,115
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 15, 39, 80, 84-9,181
Balzac, Honore de 28 Casali, Rosina 216
Barthes, Roland 7 7 n l6 ,1 0 0 ,103n6,115,142, Cattelan, Maurizio 64
144n 5-8,174, 201 Celan, Paul 106
Beaton, Cecil 25 Chanarin, Oliver 17, 98-103
Bellini, Giovanni 34 Chardin, Pierre 28
Benjamin, Walter 13, 24-5, 73, 7 7 n l3 ,104-5, Chavez, Cesar 124
107,1 08n 4,174 Chester, Lewis 21 n5
Bentham, Jeremy 222 Chiang Kai-shek 87
Bergson, Henri 31 Chion, Michel 177n3
Bestic, Alan 162n4, n9 Chudakov, Barry 221-2
Bettelheim, Bruno 152 Clancy, Tom 189
Bhutto, Benazir 98,102 Clark, Larry 125
Biemann, Ursula 18,168-70 Comte, Auguste 91, 97n6
Bischoff, Werner 119 Coppola, Francis Ford 101
Blanchot, Maurice 77n l4 Currie, Gregory 53-4, 57, 58, 61, 62n5, nlO
Bloch, Ernst 103,104
Boetti, Alighiero 64 Daney, Serge 14, 66
Boltanski, Christian 64, 66 David, Catherine 14
Bosman, Herman Charles 48 Davidson, Bruce 125
234//IN D E X
Debord, Guy 64 Friedrich, Caspar David 101
de Duve, Thierry 63, 67 Fugard, Athol 48
de Hooch, Pieter 28
de Miguel, Jesus 180 Galeano, Eduardo 1 0 5 ,108n5-6
Demos, T.J. 16 Galindo, Regina Jose 19, 215-20
Deutsch, Karl W. 129n2 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 81, 111
de Vico, Belia 217 Gardner, Alexander 174
Dickens, Charles 28 Gericault, Theodore 28
Didi-Huberman, Georges 17-18,152-5 Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison 97nl
Doblin, Alfred 90,93, 97n5 Gilbert, Alan 194-7
Duchamp, Marcel 63 Godard, Jean-Luc 67
Duncan, David Douglas 125 Goebbels, Joseph 153
Dyson, Frances 171,177nl Goldblatt, David 15, 20, 47-9
Goldmann, Francisco 215-20
Eastman, George 9 7 ,97nl2 Gordimer, Nadine 48
Edsall, Thomas B. 129n2 Gorky, Maxim 200
Eglington, Charles 49 Goya, Francisco Jose de 101
Elahi, Hasan 20, 221-2 Greenberg, Clement 63
England, Lynndie 138 Greene, Felix 118
Erwitt, Elliot 126 Grierson, Jon 12, 30-35, 52, 56, 57, 60, 62nl, 72,
Evans, Walker 1 3,16,125,128 77nl, n8
(implicit ref. as photographic collaborator, in Grimm, Albrecht 162n2
James Agee’s text) 29-30 Gunther, Hans F.K. 92
IN D E X //235
Hughes, Jim 126 Lukacs, Georg 103,104,106
Hyde, Henry 104 Lutticken, Sven 190-93
Lyon, Danny 125,128
Jaar, Alfredo 17,19, 20,109-15
Jacir, Annemarie 20, 223-4 McCausland, Elizabeth 13,25-8
Jacir, Emily 20, 225-7 McCombe, Leonard 80
Jackson, Lisa F. 18,19,163-7 McCullin, Don 15,2 1 n 5 ,101,119,125
Jennings, Humphrey 56, 57,60 Manet, Edouard 67
Johnston, Claire 77nl2, nl5 Mann, Thomas 28
Jones Griffiths, Philip 14, 20n3, 38-41 Man Ray 2 5 ,102nl
Joyce, James 28 Mao Tse-tung (phonetic anglicization
Judd, Donald 67 of Zedong)87
Mapplethorpe, Robert 104
Kahn, Douglas 103n3 Marker, Chris 200
Kamann, Dietrich 154 Martens, Renzo 19-20,208-14
Kant, Immanuel 30 Marx, Karl 1 0 8 ,108nll, 202
Kester, Grant 107,108n9 Mayes, Stephen 99
Kharakh, Ben 165-7 Maysles, Albert and David 57
Klein, William 83 Meintjes, Tony 48
Kluge, Alexander 77n9 Mengele, Josef 154
Kramer, Robert 97n8 Mercer, John 77nl0
Krauss, Dan 110 Meydenbauer, Albrecht 156-7,159,161,162n6,
162n6
Laclau, Ernesto 77n7 Mikhailov, Boris 19, 202-7
Lagerfeld, Karl 99 Mili, Gjon 80
Lange, Dorothea 16,118,125,126,127,128,131 Miller, Lee 63
Lanzmann, Claude 114 Model, Lisette 80
Laurent, Michel 17 Moholy-Nagy Laszlo 25
Lautreamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse) 181 Montt, Efram Rios 19, 216-17
Lavater, Johann Kaspar 91, 92, 97n7 Morcorelles, Louis 77n3
Lavier, Bertrand 64 Moriyama, Daido 17, 82-4
Le, An-My 14,42-6 Muller, Filip 153
Lee, Russell 125 Murdoch, Rupert 15
Le Gray, Gustave 43 Murrow, Edward R. 124
Levi, Primo 114,152
Levinas, Emmanuel 136 Nachtwey, James 101,103n8
Levi Strauss, David 17,103-8 Napoleon Bonaparte 57
Linfield, Susie 16, 21 n6 Nichols, Bill 56, 62n9
Lopez, Anibal 217
Lucaltes, John Louis 21 n6 O’Sullivan, Timothy 4 3 ,4 6
236//IN D E X
Palmer, Michael 1 0 6 ,108n7 Sandburg, Carl 9 5 ,97n ll
Panofsky, Erwin 1 5 9 ,162n7 Sander, August 89-94, 97n2-3, n9
Papageorge, Tod 102 Sanger, Margaret 123
Parsons, Talcott 95, 97nl0 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15,84-9
Payne, Lewis 142,174 Schwartz, Angelo 182
Peck, Gregory 55 Sekula, Allan 13,15,16, 20, 8 9 -9 7 ,1 0 4 ,129n3
Peckinpah, Sam 38 Serrano, Andres 104
Peirce, Charles Sanders 5 3 ,62n2 Sheeler, Charles 25
Penney, Joe 208-14 Silverstein, Melissa 163-4
Pham, Peter 222 Simon, Barney 48
Pham Thi Kim Phuc 111 Sischy, Ingrid 1 0 4 ,1 0 5 ,108n2
Phong Bui 109-15 Sissako, Abderrahmane 209,213
Picasso, Pablo 173 Smith, Aileen Mioko 15, 2 1 n 4 ,1 2 5 -6 ,129n3
Pinochet, Augusto 15 Smith, W. Eugene 15,17,19, 21 n4, 80-81, 95,
Pistoletto, Michelangelo 67 1 2 5 -6 ,129n 3,180
Plantinga, Carl 14, 52-62 Snyder, Sean 18,186-9
Plato 31 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 104
Poirier, Robert G. 162n3 Sontag, Susan 15,16, 21 n 7 ,1 0 0 ,1 0 2 ,103n4-5,
Proust, Marcel 28 n 9 ,118-22,132,135,137-8,141-3,144n3-4,
n 9 -ll, 211, 212
Raad, Walid (The Atlas Group) 18,194-7 Stalin, Joseph 47,107
Raines, Howell 130n8 Stallabrass, Julian 12-21
Rajan, Ravi 109 Steichen, Edward 94-6
Ranciere, Jacques 14,16, 20,21 n6, 63-8 Stevenson, Adlai 94
Ray, Charles 64 Steyerl, Hito 16,145-9
Reagan, Ronald 15 Stieglitz, Alfred 63
Rembrandt van Rijn 65,101 Stott, William 77n5
Renger-Patzch, Albert 105 Strand, Paul 25
Ribalta, Francisco 67 Stryker, Roy Emerson 1 2 6 ,130n6-7
Riboud, Marc 118 Swift, Jonathan 145
Richter, Hans 77n2 Szarkowski, John 20nl
Riis, Jacob 1 2 1 ,1 2 2 -3 ,1 2 8 ,129nl
Rockefeller, Nelson 94-5 Tagg.John 104
Rodger, George 65 Thatcher, Margaret 15
Ronell, Avital 103 Thierack, Otto 154
Rosier, Martha 13,15,16, 20,104,122-30 Thompson, Florence 126,127,131
Ross, Judith 43 Torgovnik, Jonathan 175
Rouchjean 77n4 Toufic,Jalal 197
Trinh T. Minh-ha 14, 20, 68-77
Salgado, Sebastiao 1 7 ,1 0 4 -6 Trotsky, Leon 47
IN D E X //237
Truffaut, Francois 66
Tucker, Anne, 20n2
Turner, Joseph Mallord William 101
238//IN D E X
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Editor’s acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marian Ang, Imogen Coker and Katy Wan for their skilled
work as research assistants on this book. It would have been poorer, in terms of
concept and contents, without their contributions. I also owe a great debt of
thanks to the Leverhulme Trust and to the Paul Mellon Centre, who granted me
fellowships that allowed me to work on this book. My understanding of the
subject has developed in large part through conversations with colleagues,
students, artists and friends: I would particularly like to thank Adam Broomberg,
Malcolm Bull, Benedict Burbridge, Oliver Chanarin, Edmund Clark, Steve Edwards,
Reginajose Galindo, Ashley Gilbertson, Philip Jones Griffiths, Sara Knelman, Sarah
James, Paul Lowe, Renzo Martens, Antigoni Memou, Alexandra Moschovi, Mignon
Nixon, Emilia Terracciano and Sarah Wilson. The editorial board and team at
Whitechapel Gallery have offered much support and many useful suggestions.
Publisher’s acknowledgements
Whitechapel Gallery is grateful to all those who gave their generous permission
to reproduce the listed material. Every effort has been made to secure all
permissions and we apologize for any inadvertent errors or ommissions. If
notified, we will endeavour to correct these at the earliest opportunity. We
would like to express our thanks to all who contributed to the making of this
volume, especially Dore Ashton, Kutlug Ataman, Ariella Azoulay, Ursula Biemann,
Adam Broomberg, Phong Bui, Judith Butler, Oliver Chanarin, Barry Chudakov,
Georges Didi-Huberman, Hasan Elahi, Joan Fontcuberta, Harun Farocki, Omer
Fast, Regina Jose Galindo, David Goldblatt, Stefan Goldby, Francisco Goldman,
Alan Gilbert, Mark Haworth-Booth, Ana Finel Honigman, Alfredojaar, Annemarie
Jacir, Emily Jacir, Lisa F. Jackson, Thomas Keenan, Ben Kharakh, An-My Le,
Thomas Y. Levin, David Levi Strauss, Louise Liwanag, Sven Liitticken, Renzo
Martens, Boris Mikhailov, Sohey Moriyama, Joe Penney, Carl Plantinga, Walid
Raad, Jacques Ranciere, Martha Rosier, Allan Sekula, Melissa Silverstein, Sean
Snyder, Hito Steyerl, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ivan Vartanian, Marek Wieczorek, Marta
Zarzycka, Christina Zelich. We also gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of
Art21, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Buzzine Networks, University of
California Press, University of Chicago Press, College Art Association, Thomas
Dane Gallery, Foto8, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Murray Guy Gallery, Harvard
University Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS// 2 3 9
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